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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character 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 provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.