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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

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 new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding 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 ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.