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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of terror.

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 much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream 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 left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.