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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). 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 backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize 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 things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, 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 tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.