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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.