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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery 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 secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer 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 quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.