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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner 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 write toward message instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.