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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies 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 recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal 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 streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.