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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple 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 thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream 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 left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.