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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.