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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods 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 another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious 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 drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.