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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.