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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods 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, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.