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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after 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 supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific 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 early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems 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 leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.