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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease 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 partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.