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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor 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 intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.