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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, 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 finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.