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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock 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 scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent 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 calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.