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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie 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. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half 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 moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.