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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation 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 signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist 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 tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest 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 stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.