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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable 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 friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.