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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay 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 left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.