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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, 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 history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.