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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed 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 primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning 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 period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality 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, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich 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 improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.