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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly 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 initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream 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 cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel 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 scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.