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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality 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 subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. 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 streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.