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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie 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 concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness 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 requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.