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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new 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 new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific 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 initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.