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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie 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 corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, 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 feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.