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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation 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 discover early on has marked the time 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 dotted 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 way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of 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 trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, 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 tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.