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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences 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 asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.