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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely 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 informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare 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 November 14th.