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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising 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 scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.