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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie 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. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal 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 productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink 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 sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.