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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable 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 discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares 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 creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.