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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond 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 mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.