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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.