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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer 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 blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical 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 painful past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.