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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities 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 appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.