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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking 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 social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple 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 viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.