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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies 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 much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.