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

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby 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 phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way 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 master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

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 original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.