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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role 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.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.