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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? 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, complicates efforts to discern, 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 last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.