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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. 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 prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult 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 eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness 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.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.