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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.