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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.