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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.