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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares 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 most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.