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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay 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 friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.