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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

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 recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus 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 scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do 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 character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels 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 original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.