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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent 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 cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.