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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.