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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

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 new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, 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 horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.