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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin 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 past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream 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 phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares 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 moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.