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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.