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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if 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 lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak 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 creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.