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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away 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 early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like 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 inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together 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 streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.