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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility 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 specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely 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 do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.