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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie 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 extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical 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 verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.