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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes 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 transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie 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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.