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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. 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 seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (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 times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.