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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic 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 way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.