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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of terror.

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 together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer 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 scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.