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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing 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 phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie 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 gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.