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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo 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 showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.