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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away 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 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 not as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled 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 corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.