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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. 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 prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize 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 weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.