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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location 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) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. 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 last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner 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, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.