I am a sucker for ambiguity in horror – if a director can give me the barest hint of information about what is going on in a film and still manage to scare me, it’s an instant favourite. I am one of those people that thinks it’s much cooler if there are no ghosts in The Innocents; I am also one of those people that refuses to watch the director’s cut of Donnie Darko that explains way to much. And that is why I immediately responded to Damian McCarthy’s directorial debut, Caveat – which is restrained in more ways than one.
Set in a rundown house on a small island that could be just about anywhere, Caveat sees amnesiac Isaac (Johnny French) agree to take care of an associate’s niece Olga. Isaac clearly is not one to ask too many questions on the journey to the house, though he has suffered a severe head injury so I won’t be to hard on him. It is only when they get to the house that Moe (played like an Eastenders gangster by Ben Caplan) begins to show Isaac what he’s in for. Moe’s niece, Olga seems to languish in states of either catatonia and homicidal violence – and who gave this girl a crossbow? It’s just one of the many prudent questions – others would be: why leave the girl in this horrible house, especially since her father died here and this was the last place her mother was seen before she went missing, and why Moe expects Isaac to spend the entirety of his time here chained into a leather jacket to keep him from wandering too freely around the house. Isaac. mate, get back on the boat. And that was before I even saw the collar.
McCarthy, who went on to make the superior Oddity, created a calling card film with Caveat. Calling card movies are the types of debut features that show what a filmmaker could be, their potential, even if that’s not always realized the first time around, the likes of Blood Simple by the Coens, Following by Christopher Nolan, Dark Star by John Carpenter and Eraserhead by David Lynch. Looking back at these debuts now, with a career between the novices and the bigwigs, it is easy to see the obsessions and idiosyncrasies that would fuel their careers.
Caveat, like those debuts, does a lot with basically nothing. With one location and a few actors, McCarthy has turned the house into a liminal space not unlike the secret rooms added within a nightmare. With every new discovery, the silent scares that sneak around the edges of the frame, and every clue that this house has seen a lot more terror than we thought, McCarthy expertly squeeze the maximum tension out of this small tale. It is a ghost story (one that wouldn’t be out of place beside the MR James adaptations from A Ghost Story for Christmas), a small scale thriller that makes you feel as if the walls are closing in, and the perfect way for a horror director to announce himself.
With Hokum on the the way in just a few weeks, it’ll be interesting to see how McCarthy picks up on this idiosyncrasies with his third feature, especially after the brilliance of his sophomore flick Oddity. Where do you stand on McCarthy’s work so far, and what are you hoping to see from his latest? Let us know in the comments below!
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By Kevin Boyle
(header image via The Guardian)
No But Listen 