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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, 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 last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.