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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, 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 at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled 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 serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact 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 frequently script toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.