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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier 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 highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.