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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend 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 actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? 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 discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.