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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie 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 optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal 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 prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring 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 smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.