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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed 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 mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing 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 calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, 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 previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.