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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) 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 traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting 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 adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, 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 tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.