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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

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 learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike 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 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 initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.