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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. 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 streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.