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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock 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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer 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, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.