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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new 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 new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes 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 tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.