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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable 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 informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.