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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract 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 demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.