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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.