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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.