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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on 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 period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing 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 often write for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.