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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. 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 tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, 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 exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.