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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling 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 luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable 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 calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies 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, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.