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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of terror.

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 much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist 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 discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical 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 particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative 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 manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.