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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together 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 nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond 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 doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.