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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, 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 previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner 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 perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.