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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance 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 (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.