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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.