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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier 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 highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling 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 serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic 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 concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.