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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies 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 compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.