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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.