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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird 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 inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.