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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run 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 creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role 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.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes 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 messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.