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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

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 recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go 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 streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled 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 corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.