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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds 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 friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled 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 periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However 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 shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.