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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. 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 run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.