This first feature from writer-director-editor Damian McCarthy sounds like it’s been assembled from off-the-shelf horror movie components: a protagonist with amnesia, missing people, a maybe-haunted house on an island (with a basement!), a creepy toy animal, and flashbacks that require the viewer to keep track of hairstyles and beard lengths to tell where we are in the timeline.
But McCarthy plays a fancy cinematic game of hide the lady, swishing the narrative cards around adeptly and finding fresh ways to imbue the material with an incrementally increasing sense of unease. Props are particularly due to the props department, or whoever was responsible for the design of the mechanical drumming rabbit toy that plays a key role – a creature with human-looking glass eyes that glare out from a beetled brow with a calibrated expression of wariness, aggression and complicity. Give that bunny a Bafta!
Its co-star is Jonathan French, who plays Isaac, an amnesiac young man with an impressive red beard, hired by a stranger named Barret (Ben Caplan) to “babysit” his niece. This is Olga (Leila Sykes), a young woman prone to fits of catatonia and running off to stay in the house where her father, Barret’s brother, killed himself some time ago, not long after his wife went missing. Most people would be wary of any job offer, no matter how remunerative, under just those conditions, but the weirdest part is that Isaac has to wear a leather harness, attached by lock and key to a long chain anchored in the basement, because Olga, when not in a catatonic state, is terrified of men.
Nevertheless, Isaac takes the job, and soon finds himself clanking about the building, peeping through roughly sawn holes in the wall, his face lit like Anthony Perkins in Psycho, and being freaked out by a painting that keeps falling down and changing its image when he’s not looking. The painting could be a metonym for the film itself, which seems to shapeshift under the viewer’s gaze. The effect is both modern in its oblique surrealism but also reminiscent of silent cinema. The final endgame is a little unsatisfying, but this is a very interesting debut for McCarthy.
• Caveat is released on 3 June on Shudder.
