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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things 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 asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.