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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable 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 tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting 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 annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true 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 seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.