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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new 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 believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious 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 pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way 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 particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.