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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, 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 concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.