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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time 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 not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains 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 seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months 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 blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true 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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.