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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing 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 by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did 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 go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (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 new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful 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 or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.