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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.