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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing 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 by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run 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 creepiest initial scenes 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 freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.