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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed 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 mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream 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 inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.