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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.