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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.