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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away 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 quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful 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 way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. 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 productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film 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 compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.