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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing 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 left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist 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 in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way 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 frequently script toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place 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 going on.) However Maslany provides a second level 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 shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, 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 satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.