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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition 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 tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into 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 usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.