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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances 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 fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.