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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released 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 hopeful 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 idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if 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 lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, 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 concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.