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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn 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 neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality 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 camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells 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 – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.