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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half 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 out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish 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 deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies 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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.