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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.