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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (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 spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning 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 marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, 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 finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.