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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation 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 discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible 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 in-movie (so many of the creepiest 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 stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.