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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of terror.

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 together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream 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 doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels 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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.