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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.