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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh 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 new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation 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 deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing 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 cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

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 alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.