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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "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 mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.