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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level 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 recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly 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 oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.