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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact 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 frequently write toward message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.