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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; 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 traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick 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 over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.