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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears 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 river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go 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 really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.