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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.