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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair 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 ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.