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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). 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 backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.