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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time 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 not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.