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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.