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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion 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 supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.