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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level 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 period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.