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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head 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 master of scares who has been on a productive streak 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 vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed 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 acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.