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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing 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 friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie 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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.