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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) 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 location together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal 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 last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.