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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising 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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing 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 phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together 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 prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.