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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; 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 any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.