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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.