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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising 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 marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned 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 comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick 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 unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.