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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities 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 shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films 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 marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.