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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents 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 a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling 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 horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, 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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.