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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.