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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing 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 left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.