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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

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 new and much-concealed 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 fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny 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 self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.