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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role 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 terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element 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 alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels 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 finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.