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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical 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 female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical 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 irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.