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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply 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 informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes 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 Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.