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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted 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 way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike 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 productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up 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 prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.