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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing 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 calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head 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 horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film 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 part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful 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 scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.