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Caveat Invites You to an Island of Ghosts and Weird Drum Bunnies
Caveat Invites You to an Island of Ghosts and Weird Drum Bunnies
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Damian Mc Carthy, whose new film
Caveat premiered on Shudder on June 3rd.
Caveat poster and Castle Talk logo used by permission.
The producers describe this tense Irish haunted house movie thus:
In
Caveat, Lone drifter Isaac accepts a job to look after his landlord s niece, Olga, for a few days in an isolated house on a remote island. It seems like easy money, but there s a catch: he must wear a leather harness and chain that restricts his movements to certain rooms. Once Olga s uncle, Barrett leaves the two of them alone, a game of cat and mouse ensues as Olga displays increasingly erratic behavior as a trapped Isaac makes a series of horrific discoveries in the house.
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One reason why horror is such a popular genre for filmmakers on a tight budget is that it doesn’t take much money to give an audience the creeps. In Damian Mc Carthy’s “Caveat,” all the writer-director needs is a ragged rabbit toy, some grotesquely contorted faces, and a few tiny portals and passageways that offer glimpses of things no one should see.
For a first-time feature filmmaker, Mc Carthy shows a remarkable level of confidence in “Caveat,” working with a plot so minimal that it sometimes ranges into pure sensation. After a brief set-up, this movie quickly becomes the story of a few eccentric and potentially dangerous people circling each other in the darkened corridors of a crumbling house on a remote Irish island.
When the slick and calculating Barret (Ben Caplan) offers Isaac (Jonathan French) a five-day job babysitting Barret s adult niece Olga, who needs company at her isolated childhood home, Isaac, a drifter suffering from some kind of amnesia and the mental fog that goes with it, is confused. Barret claims to be an old friend, but Isaac has no memory of him. Also, why is this supposed old friend offering him so much money to hang out with a woman clearly too old to need a babysitter ? Isaac says, baffled, There s got to be more to it than that. Suddenly, the title card appears, in jagged letters: CAVEAT.