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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away 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 period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "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 mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.