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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded 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 much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. 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 prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.