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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level 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 recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly 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 dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair 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 eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like 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 straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.