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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.