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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie 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 corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become 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 masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.