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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.