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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. 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 luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.