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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. 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, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.