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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. 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 rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like 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 lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.