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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, 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 nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems 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 trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.