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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, 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 past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.