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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, 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 uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful 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 recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical 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 particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film 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 tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.