Caveat (2020)

directed by Damian McCarthy

Ireland

88 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Lately it seems like there's been a rise in what I think can be called unsafe horror: Horror movies in which the entire atmosphere is unsafe, as opposed to a single situation that the protagonist gets into either by mistake or by force. Of course, this has always been an element of the horror genre, but I look to the past and I largely see films where the unsafe situation does not take up the entirely of the movie. Caveat, and the rest of the films of its ilk that I'm referring to, is made out of uncertainty. We never get a toehold of familiarity to grasp onto; there's never anything reassuring or good, it's just wall-to-wall dread. I've been looking forward to seeing this one for a while now and I'm happy to say it does not disappoint.

Not only is the main character in an unsafe, bizarre situation, he himself seems to be inherently unsafe due to the fallibility of his memories, which is revealed increasingly throughout the film. The protagonist's self-doubt and unawareness of his past is used by a shady acquaintance to rope him into a shady housesitting gig involving his shady friend's daughter. This is how the film sets itself up: The main character getting duped into doing something by somebody who has way more knowledge of him than he does. So while we, the viewers, are kept in the dark, so is the main character. We have to watch everything unfold at the speed he does, and instead of feeling clunky or slow, this only ramps up the tension and, as I said, removes any anchor we might have where we can sympathize with somebody. Every character in this has something suspicious about them and that prevents us from getting comfortable.

I'm really amazed by just how oppressively uneasy the overall atmosphere of Caveat is. How it manages to make what is probably a pretty small house in reality seem labyrinthine, its walls about to fall down and blanket the characters in dank moldering wallpaper and splintery boards. Isolated on an island, decrepit and lonely, it's never explained why the people the protagonist is housesitting for still live there or how they get by in such an obviously meager situation. Nothing is ever explained except for that which is relevant to figuring out how the main character came to be in the spot he's in.

I'm going to say what I usually do when I review scary movies, which is that I don't think scariness should be a measure of the quality of a horror film by any means... but also that when a horror movie does manage to stick the landing and be properly terrifying, it can be so much fun. The last twenty minutes of this movie were SO deeply unsettling that I found myself leaning away from the screen because I was just so on edge. This is one of those movies that seems to be comprised entirely of the moment before something jumps out at you. I could count the number of actual jump scares it uses on one hand, but it makes such good use of the tension right before a jump scare that it feels like the whole thing is one big one. There's a specific scene where the main character is passing his flashlight beam around a horrible, horrible room in the basement that contains horrible things, and this musical sting keeps playing that was genuinely so nerve-wracking that I felt like I was flinching every time it hit, like a nervous dog hearing fireworks or something. I haven't seen a movie this effectively scary in a long time. I feel okay discussing this as an aspect of the film, because how scary it is is integral to the story and the film as a larger picture. This can't be isolated from its creepy parts the way some horror movies can.

And the best part is that this is not without its hidden symbols and unexplained strangenesses, so even while you might be watching in peeps from behind your hands, you can still catch things that linger in your mind and require extra thinking. No cheap scares here. One motif in particular that kept coming up throughout the film was circles. They appear often enough that they clearly mean something, but it's never explicitly established what. As a horror fan the thing I immediately thought of here was Ringu and the ghostly, electric-white circle on the videotape that represents the well Sadako was thrown down. It's likely that the circles in Caveat actually represent something similar: A hint at where a body is, perhaps a final image that someone saw. But the circles are just everywhere, and are even carried around by multiple characters in the form of flashlight beams, roving portable circles that can go with them from scene to scene. It's like by cutting the power, something in the house was forcing the characters to carry around its mark on them.

I'm going to cut myself off here, because I'm going on too long about this out of excitement at something new and really really freaky, but I wanted to mention the last thing that's perplexing me about this, and that's what the dog means. Outside the nasty old house is a friendly midsized dog who seems to be decently taken care of, but is chained up in the backyard. When the main character gets to the house he is also put on a chain, so there's an obvious parallel there, and when he leaves, he takes the dog (good on him), but what does the dog mean? Why is it there? We only see it two, maybe three times throughout the whole movie, and it doesn't do anything but eat some potted meat and look cute. This leaves me with no choice but to create a picture in my mind of the dog just chilling outside the house the entire time, unaware, while unspeakably frightening things happen inside. This is probably the only time where I'm glad somebody never let their dog inside the house.