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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.