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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking 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 direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

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 concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.