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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie 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 compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.