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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing 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 by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.