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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance 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 closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.