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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; 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 venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, 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 eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner 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 eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or 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 improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.