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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away 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 learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort 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 completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing 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 left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (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 previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.