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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game 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 invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.