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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing 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 frequently write for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, 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 concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas 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 stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.