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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, 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 woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.