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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. 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 productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled 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 previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.