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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing 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 left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended 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 prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause 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 that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting 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 usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.