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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released 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 optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? 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 tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for theme instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.