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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new 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. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer 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 an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write for message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.