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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like 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 inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.