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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

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 approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film 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 previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.