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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.