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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact 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, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex 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 gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.