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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new 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 much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.