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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

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 recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run 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 creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.