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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares 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 most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel 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 performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.