The Reel Review
A man suffering from amnesia accepts his former landlord’s offer to stay with the landlord’s mentally disturbed niece, who lives alone in a dilapidated house on an remote island on a lake in Ireland. What could go wrong, right? He soon finds himself caught up in a mystery involving treachery, murder and the supernatural, in this horror/thriller on AMC+.
For a super low budget horror, writer/director Damian Mc Carthy starts off with a bang. His setting is super creepy – from the cabin that looks so run down that you can almost smell the decay, to the spooky, paranoid Olga (Leila Sykes), carrying around a demented looking, human-eyed variation of the Energizer Bunny that beats its drum when the supernatural is near. The score is effective too, striking just that right note of tension without becoming campy. And despite all the blatantly bad life choices our protagonist makes – like agreeing to be chained up in a medieval looking harness so as not to disturb poor man-triggered Olga – the fascination is strong enough to keep our attention focused on what new bizarre thing will happen next – at least initially.
What doesn’t work so well is the actual story. The building sense of dread is palpable throughout the first half, as our hapless, memory-addled visitor gets dragged deeper and deeper into an increasingly dire situation. But by the third act, patience is exhausted and it becomes clear that those scenes shot in dimly lit rooms merely are just to distract from the lack of a coherent story. Our protagonist’s varying beard/no beard scenes provide the road map to flashbacks of what had happened previously. But by the finale we still don’t really know what really happened nor do we really care, unfortunately. Still, for a debut effort, at least Caveat is interesting – its caveat, that the living can be more frightening than the dead.
REEL FACTS
• Caveat was filmed at Bantry House in County Cork, Ireland.
• Mc Carty actually filmed Caveat in 2017. It took him several years of saving money to pay for the post-production editing.
• Jonathan French received a Best Actor nomination in 2020 at FrightFest UK for his performance in Caveat.
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