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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation 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 quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.