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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend 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 doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.