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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river 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 cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts 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 tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, 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 tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.