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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

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 highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "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 actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended 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 streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, 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 figure still seems complete.

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 finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.