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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

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 together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible 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 discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich 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 feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.