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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. 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, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

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 finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.