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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go 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 terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.