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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs 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 somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of 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 experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (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 stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: 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 speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, 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 seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.