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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

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 recently released and highly secretive scary film 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. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.