Unease: A Review of Damian McCarthy’s Caveat (2020)
“You want me to sneak into your brother’s house and lock him in the basement?”
“Yes.”
Following fast on the heels of my piece about McCarthy’s Oddity, I decided to dive into his directorial debut film Caveat (2020).
Caveat will be a hit with fans of a slow-burn, psychological horror, and McCarthy makes magic out of the constraints of a low budget and small sets. The plot is, at times, convoluted, but it is executed so well that I can forgive the rather confusing (and at times absurd) beginning.
There are a number of rather scathing reviews of this film already online (most of them by American reviewers) that equate the slow build of the plot with a lack of creativity or outright boredom. This is, fundamentally, unfair, and I would go so far as to argue that the ‘boredom’ on their part is, in truth, an inability to keep their focus on a film unless it has blood splattering the walls or a monster tearing through flesh every two minutes. The slow burn is an art, and McCarthy has mastered the skill of building and maintaining tension.
I’m a bit of a horror veteran at this point, and Caveat had my heart rate up consistently throughout the film. A decaying house and a sense of isolation are not new to the genre, but McCarthy succeeds in fostering a sense of claustrophobia that is far more present and much more intimate than simple solitude can stoke.
this section contains spoilers
Synopsis
Caveat’s plot is a bit difficult to wrap your head around, so bear with me here:
Isaac (Jonathan French) is an amnesiac drifter suffering from intermittent memory loss after falling out of an upper-floor balcony while inebriated. Isaac is struggling to find work, so his friend/landlord Moe (Ben Caplan) offers him a “babysitting job” looking after his schizophrenic niece Olga (Leila Sykes) in her house in the countryside.
Isaac (Jonathan French) in the house’s harness.
Isaac accepts, and upon arriving at the house, realizes that Moe has left out a few key details. Namely, that the house is on an island accessible only by rowboat, and that while in the house he must wear a harness that prevents him from accessing certain rooms – or leaving.
Disturbed, but unable to back out of the deal, Isaac begrudgingly accepts. Moe leaves, taking the rowboat with him, and Isaac settles into his first night in the house.
McCarthy throws a few tried-and-true scare tactics at the viewer here, but they’re not done cheaply. The dreadful wind-up rabbit toy of Olga’s acts as a kind of dowsing rod for the paranormal, drumming whenever “something hidden in the house” draws near. (Side note: the rabbit is truly deeply unsettling – a testament to the lead costume designer Lisa Zagone’s skills). Using the rabbit to guide him, Isaac finds the corpse of Olga’s mother decaying in a wall in the basement and makes a plan to escape.
Olga (Leila Sykes) and her haunted rabbit toy.
As he takes steps to get away, more and more of the plot is revealed, but none of these characters are reliable narrators. Olga tells Isaac that he was at the house last year – that he locked Olga’s father in the basement on Moe’s request and spurred him to take his own life. Isaac, of course, doesn’t remember this, and Moe takes every opportunity to throw doubt on Isaac’s existing memories.
As the film unfolds, the house triggers Isaac more and more – and he recalls the source of his “accident” (Moe pushing up off the balcony while he was inebriated) and the truth of Olga’s father’s death (that Isaac arrived at the house to warn him of Moe’s plan, only to find the door to the basement already locked).
The film never reveals who bears the brunt of responsibility for these deaths (the dead mother, Olga, or Moe), but one thing is clear: Isaac is innocent, and as horrifying as the house may be, it does seem to be fielding his escape, not thwarting it.
The climax of the film is equal parts freaky and satisfying, as Isaac makes his escape, taking with him the abused dog that sits tethered outside the house. Moe and Olga remain trapped, and it is up to the viewer to determine what fate befalls them after the film’s close.
Criticism
You can tell that this film is low budget, but by no means does that mean it is badly done. I truly think the budget restrictions here let McCarthy’s creativity shine, and the lack of breadth of the setting made the film feel incredibly claustrophobic. I do think the plot could have been delivered with a bit more clarity – there are key differences between keeping the audience in the dark intentionally and keeping the audience in the dark because your delivery is lacking. The confusion rides the line here, but overall, this is forgivable with how unsettling the film was as a whole.
Zagone’s haunted rabbit creation.
I find it fascinating that both main characters in this film are “mad” (i.e. suffer from mental health conditions). Isaac’s amnesia makes him unreliable to both himself and the viewers, whereas Olga’s schizophrenia and episodes of catatonia render her unreliable and, more dangerously, untrustworthy to Isaac.
As such, I’d classify Caveat as a kind of “madness narrative” in its foregrounding of madness to leverage not unease, but uncertainty throughout the film. Isaac and Olga are not necessarily pathologized in the sense that their mental illnesses are used to excuse violent or destructive behaviour. Rather, their mental illnesses are positioned as valid reasons for the key turning points in the story. This fits nicely with Anca-Luisa Viusenco’s work on literary madness. She writes:
What precisely is, in the end, a madness narrative? Firstly, it must be noted that this umbrella phrase is used deliberately, as a strategy to simultaneously “recognize the meaning attached to the perception of illness or dysfunction in the psychological domain” (Jane Ussher, qtd. in Hubert 2002:19), avoid psychological and psychiatric jargon (as in accounts by schizophrenics), and “interrogate the discourses that maintain the construction of mental illness and the bifurcation of sanity and insanity.”
This bifurcation is present from frame one, as Isaac may be “mad”, but he is not insane – he makes, for the most part, soundly logical decisions in spite of his amnesia. Conversely, Olga is both mad and insane, in that she is unrealizable, unstable, and acts without the aid of an externalizing logic. Moe is not-mad and insane, with his chaotic, destructive, and manipulative actions acting as the driving force behind the events of the film.
Madness is really the focus of the piece, with elements of the supernatural scattered throughout the film more for flavour than for substance. The spirits in the house are secondary to the evil wrought by the living, and for the most part, the spirits are really just trying to communicate with Isaac – they’re not trying to bring any harm. In a way, the supernatural in this film is holding the madness in check – feeding unease but providing a kind of veiled guidance in a story where none of the living can be trusted.
I’d like to highlight here that most of the shots are warm-toned – a pattern I noticed in McCarthy’s Oddity as well. I wonder if this is a marker of McCarthy’s style, and if that style will evolve as time goes on. I do think the warm-wash horror is incredibly affective, for reasons I discuss in detail in my piece on Oddity, and that affect rings true in Caveat as well. The warmth of the house contrasts its hostility and decay, and when the power goes out and our light source switches to the cool-toned flashlight, it almost punctures the mood.
Olga in a catatonic state, illuminated by a flashlight during the climax of the film.
Overall, McCarthy’s strength here is his ability to build and maintain tension. I’m a horror veteran and this film had me tense from start to finish – a feat only accomplished previously by Jordan Peele’s Us. With that noted, McCarthy is on my list as a director whose work I will be watching closely.
Until next time,
L
Works Cited
McCarthy, Damian, director. Caveat. HyneSight Films, 2020.
Viusenco, Anca-Luisa. “The madness narrative, between the literary, the therapeutic and the political.” Romanian Journal of English Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 1 Mar. 2013, pp. 312–323, https://doi.org/10.2478/rjes-2013-0030.
