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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy 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 together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent 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 family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.