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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze 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 friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.