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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river 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 acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film 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 tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.