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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.