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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers 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 polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, 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 tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.