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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel 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 performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.