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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

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 recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.