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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.