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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling 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 recently released and much-concealed scary film 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 appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. 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 prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies 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 marketing, could cause 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 part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.