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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.