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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels 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 expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing 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 acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.