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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises 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, as if she's about to transcend 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 mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares 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 within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. 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 mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.