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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable 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 informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.