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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.