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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like 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 acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods 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 scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.