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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike 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 an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended 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 invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.