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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level 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 new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. 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, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.