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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.