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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy 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 about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike 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 run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.