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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. 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 last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes 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 fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.