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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

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 new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.