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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level 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 highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.