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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.