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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "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 doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

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 finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.