Having watched, and liked, Oddity some months ago, I was glad when a friend told me that Caveat was by the same writer/director, Damian McCarthy. I don’t always pay close attention to director’s names unless I’m writing a book where that’s relevant. I should pay more attention, since Caveat was also quite good. And I found it on a streaming service for the price of watching commercials. The premise is quite creepy. Isaac is suffering from amnesia. His landlord offers him good pay to watch his niece for a week. She has a mental condition, he says, but she’s harmless. She lives in a remote house and all he has to do is stay with her. Distressed to learn that the house is the only one on an island, since he can’t swim, nevertheless he takes the job. But there is a caveat. He has to be chained in a harness that limits how far he can go.
Olga, the niece, is catatonic when they arrive. When she starts walking and speaking she’s armed with a crossbow. She tells Isaac that he was on the island before and that he locked her father in the basement where he shot himself with the crossbow. His landlord, her uncle, is the one who sent him to do that. He has no memory of it. Isaac and Olga distrust each other, each attempting to get the upper hand. Supernatural events take place while Isaac struggles to remember. Isaac escapes the harness and locks Olga into it, but she shoots his leg with the crossbow. There seems to be some indication that Olga’s mother—killed by her father and uncle and buried behind a wall in the basement—is the source of the supernatural occurrences. The landlord comes to the island and Olga shoots him and his dead sister-in-law stalks him in the dark. Isaac manages to escape.
There is a bit of confusion about parts of the film, but it works as a distinctly unsettling horror story. The toy bunny that Olga, and then Isaac, uses is very creepy. Mostly it’s the premise that makes this folk horror scary. Being left on an island with someone of questionable sanity while chained up in a house is already frightening. The supernatural elements, which are few and brief, add enough fear to tie all of this together as a good example of Euro-horror that has elements of folk horror to it. I will be adding Damian McCarthy to my list of horror directors to keep an eye on.