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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive 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. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso 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 performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.