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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, 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 previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.