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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments 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 freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

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 compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.