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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released 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 bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.