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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing 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 cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike 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 run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character 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.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.