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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences 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 asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.