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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan 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 reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike 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 prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue 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 complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.