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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent 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 awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

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 concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.