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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed 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. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer 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 deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.