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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; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed 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 mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure 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 leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.