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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem 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 hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples 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 ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.