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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising 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 a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen 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 film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.