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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; 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 venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled 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 social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. 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 run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling 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 freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. 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 self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.