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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level 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 recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition 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 calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.