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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.