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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked 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 nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. 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 tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner 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 contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: 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.