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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) 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 pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. 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, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.