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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new 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 fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.