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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular 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 acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.