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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. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

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 new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods 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 tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.