Tonight's Horror Movie: Caveat (2020)

When I reviewed Oddity earlier this week, I noted that I was impressed enough by the sophomore film from writer/director Damian McCarthy that I wanted to see his debut, Caveat sooner rather than later.

Well, sooner turned out to be a lot sooner.

I cannot say that Caveat is as good as Oddity, but I enjoyed it and it is proof of what a talented director can do with almost no budget. I wouldn’t call it a great movie, but it wasn’t a bad way to spend 90 very strange, very creepy minutes.

Call it the story of one man’s search for his lost Member’s Only jacket. Or maybe it is the story of a weird-looking bunny and his love for drums. One thing is for sure, McCarthy loves to make movies about really screwed-up families.

I won’t spend any more time on a preamble because I’d like to dive into the plot before getting to where I think Caveat missed but, more importantly, where the movie and McCarthy absolutely hit.

Caveat introduces us to Isaac (Jonathan French, who also had a smaller role in Oddity), a down-on-his-luck drifter who is recovering from an unknown accident that has left him with amnesia. Isaac’s friend — or is he? Like Memento’s Leonard Shelby, Isaac can’t remember — Moe Barrett (Ben Caplan, The Passion) offers him a short-term job “babysitting” Moe’s niece Olga (Leila Sykes, Lancaster Skies). Olga is quite a troubled young woman. She likes to go out by herself to an old remote house where her father killed himself recently and where her mother went missing close to a year ago. She is also extremely autistic, maybe even schizophrenic, and is prone to falling into brief catatonic states (we saw McCarthy use this latter trait again in Oddity). When Olga isn’t in a trance, she enjoys walking around the house with a crossbow or with a strange zombified stuffed bunny that plays the drums.

Please don’t laugh. I haven’t gotten to the funny part yet.

Isaac agrees to the job, only to find out that it is located on a remote island with no other residents. He almost backs out, but Barrett manages to convince him to take a boat out to the house. There, Moe tells him the “caveat.” Olga is afraid of anyone being in the house with her, so she demands that any company be locked in a harness that is chained to a bolt in the basement. The chain is quite long, just not long enough to reach into Olga’s room (or the bathroom, it humorously turns out in a funny first-act moment). After saying “Hell no!”, Isaac inexplicably allows Moe to convince him to go along with it after Moe shows him how harmless Olga is (no, Isaac hasn’t seen the crossbow yet).

OK, I am going to pause for a moment here to recognize that yes, this is a ridiculous premise. The house is dilapidated, it is in the middle of nowhere, there is only one phone and it is in Olga’s room, and Olga, despite appearing harmless, is really quite disturbed (understandably, given her parental situation). There is NO WAY that anyone agrees to these conditions, even if it is just for a few days as Moe promises Isaac. It simply defies any suspension of disbelief. I don’t care how down on your luck you are or how much you need some quick cash, it just would not happen.

I mention this now because I almost turned Caveat off at this point. I’m glad I didn’t because there was a good movie that ensued afterward, but I can understand if some viewers might not be able to get over this outlandish setup.

But Isaac does agree. On his first day and night, he doesn’t see any of Olga. She is busy in her catatonic state upstairs. Isaac experiences some spooky, possibly supernatural phenomena on that first night, be he appears to pass it off as dreams that he had.

The next morning, he discovers the bunny, which is another amusing early moment, made better by Isaac’s facial expressions when the bunny plays his drum. This zombie rabbit has no name but seems to act as a sort of divining rod. It starts banging its drum whenever it wants to draw someone’s attention to something in the room. Again, it seems silly on its face, but somehow it does seem to work.

Olga then comes down and tells Isaac that her father and Moe are not good people and that her mother was a madwoman, whatever happened to her. Oh, and Olga is carrying the crossbow now, which Isaac is not at all happy to see. But she still does not seem overtly threatening in any way.

Later that day Isaac discovers something horrifying in the basement (no spoilers) when he goes down to try to see if he can break loose of his chain. He runs up to Olga’s room and discovers a clever way to use the phone. He calls Moe, tells him to call the police, and Moe promises that he will take care of everything. Isaac then speaks to Olga in the doorway (that’s as far as the chain will allow him to go), telling her what he found. It is then that Olga goes into her bathroom, puts on a red Members Only-looking jacket, and tells Isaac that it is his jacket, that he left it there the last time he was at this same house.

Whaaaa…? And suddenly, Olga does not seem so non-threatening anymore.

And now we’ve got an ever-evolving game of cat and mouse in the worst-looking house you have ever seen in your life. As this game plays out over the rest of the movie, we find out through flashbacks, as Isaac slowly regains his memory, the truth of his history with this incredibly fucked up family, where maybe Olga is the only normal one. And we find out whether or not Isaac had anything to do with the suicide of Olga’s father or the disappearance of Olga’s mother. Throughout all of this, there is always a hint of the supernatural going on in the house, but it doesn’t really reveal itself until the final act.

The movie is a long slow burn punctuated at several points with some genuine terrifying moments, which seems now characteristic of McCarthy’s style through two movies.

French delivers a great performance as Isaac, but I think the same cannot be said of Caplan or Sykes. Caplan is a little too hamfisted as the overbearing brother/uncle, and Sykes doesn’t deliver dialogue too well (her silent moments are chilling though).

Finally, while the payoff in the movie delivers, it doesn’t really justify the ridiculous nature of the premise. I am not sure anything could deliver on a premise as mind-bogglingly unbelievable as this one.

But even with those misses, McCarthy does craft a very well-made film. At the top of the list here is atmosphere. As with Oddity, he uses the common trope of the isolated house in the woods. But McCarthy is not lazy. He builds on that with some quality techniques, most importantly sound. Isaac’s breathing is emphasized throughout the final act, and that alone will have you on the edge of your seat. Isaac is also told that a family of foxes lives on the island and their screams (used by females as a mating call and males as a warning sign) sound like that of a teenage girl. This is actually true and McCarthy inserts the fox noises at some outstanding moments. Add to that the creaking floors and the constant clinking of the chain attached to the harness and you have a sound design and execution that will send chills up your spine.

The dilapidated nature of the house itself is also common for horror movies, but McCarthy dials it all up a notch with holes in the walls, gothic-style paintings, water-stained wallpaper, and such an overall mess everywhere that you wonder how anyone without the last name “Sawyer” could even live here. And then there’s the basement. So creepy, I was half expecting to see the entire collection of baubles from Cabin In The Woods down there. Oh, and have I mentioned the crawlspaces? Oh, yeah. There are crawlspaces.

McCarthy also uses some inventive camera angles, as well as other techniques like dolly shots that I noticed and appreciated in Oddity. I was a little disappointed by the obvious move to have the power go out at night, but it seems kind of de rigeur for the isolated house setting.

As for violence, well, there is a crossbow in this movie, after all. But it’s nothing too gratuitous. For a horror movie, this is downright tame. Give it a Gore Score of 2/10. Maybe 3/10 when you see what Isaac discovers in the basement.

I know some people might not be able to get past the premise. Honestly, I am still kind of laughing at it myself. But if you can force your brain to turn off its skepticism switch for a little while, you will forget about that premise after a while because you are getting pretty chilled by all that happens after.

For all of that looniness that I described in the beginning, this is not an overly twisted plot. It is fairly simple and straightforward. But as I mentioned with Oddity, for McCarthy, the story itself doesn’t seem half as important to him as how he tells that story. And in Caveat, he tells it very well. Granted, with a few hiccups, but pretty impressive for a feature-length movie debut.

If you decide to watch Caveat, I think you will find it to be 90 haunting minutes well spent. If you skip it, you won’t be missing greatness, but we should all be looking out for what McCarthy does next. Because if he keeps building on his talent the way he has done with Caveat and then Oddity, we’re all in for a horror treat with his next outing.

[To that point, I have not seen Damian McCarthy attached to any new projects yet, but I will be watching very closely and with keen interest.]