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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation 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 quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.