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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

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 new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended 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 prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, 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 finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.