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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues 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 deeply 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 friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of 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 horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.