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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not 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 mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out 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 horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.