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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.