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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

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 recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes 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 often script for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character 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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.