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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes 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 well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.