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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified 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 warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for 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 permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange 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 mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.