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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance 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 (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

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 highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling 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 murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, 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 gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.