Caveat, 2020.
Directed by Damian McCarthy.
Starring Ben Caplan, Jonathan French, Leila Sykes, Inma Pavon, and Conor Dwane.
SYNOPSIS:
A man is offered a job of keeping an eye on a troubled woman in an isolated house for a few days – what could possibly go wrong?
Rarely has a movie title been as apt as Caveat, the debut feature from writer/director Damian McCarthy, a movie that asks you to accept a proposition of such absurd conditions – the type of scenario you watch and say “If that was me there’s no way I’d say yes” – that all you can do is go with it and see what happens. Thankfully, Damian McCarthy seems to realise this and imbues his movie with an atmosphere so rich with dread and fear that it overcomes its narrative shortcomings to build into a somewhat effective slow burner.
In this case, the scenario is that loner Isaac (Jonathan French) is made an offer by his ‘friend’ Moe Barrett (Ben Caplan) to spend a few days at his deceased brother’s house looking after his niece Olga (Leila Sykes). Barrett does share that his niece has some issues – hardly surprising since her father is dead and her mother is missing – that may be alarming at first but he’ll pay Isaac £200 a day just to keep an eye on her. A friend asking a friend for help may not seem odd but it turns out that Isaac suffers from partial amnesia after an undisclosed (for now) accident and takes Barrett at his word that they used to be friends, although Isaac does have his suspicions about him.
Anyway, when Barrett takes Isaac to the house alarm bells start to ring as the house is on an island surrounded by water and, apparently, Isaac cannot swim. Still, the slick Barrett persuades him to take the boat over to the house and once there tells Isaac he must wear a harness connected to a length of chain tethered to a post in the basement. The chain is a certain length so Isaac is unable to go into certain rooms, mainly Olga’s bedroom, which happens to be where the only phone in the house is. Thanks to some expert persuasion from Barrett Isaac agrees to wear the harness, and once left alone in the house with Olga things start to get a bit weird as the full extent of Barrett’s plan is revealed.
So basically, in order for Caveat to work the audience has to accept a series of contrived and convoluted circumstances for the big payoff that is inevitably going to happen, and whilst Damian McCarthy is asking quite a bit he does reward the viewer with a dank atmosphere and some creepy imagery and sound cues that clearly take their inspiration from the The Drop of Water segment of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, which is no bad thing as instilling fear without having to do very much to achieve it is no easy task.
An eerie and oppressive chamber piece, Caveat – much like Isaac himself – does take a bit of convincing to get its point across and strangely, for a film that relies on a few shock moments to fully work, a second viewing tends to bring more out of it; perhaps because by then you’ve already figured out the elaborate plotting that has gone into getting Isaac where he needs to be and you can just let the gloom envelope you, revealing some of its darker secrets when you pay more attention to the setting and surroundings. And whilst the scares are effective and leave some spine-chilling imagery in your memory after the credits roll, there are still a few baffling plot elements that just don’t seem to tie up very well, namely with Olgas and her troubled past. Ignore those and Caveat is a movie that will no doubt give those of a nervous disposition the heebie-jeebies, but just don’t analyse the plot too much as it does take the edge off an otherwise solid directorial debut.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
Originally published February 28, 2022. Updated May 16, 2022.
