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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak 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 creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical 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 irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.