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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots 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 vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend 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 asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (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 freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things 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 asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.