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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know 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 verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies 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 leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.