Review: CAVEAT

A room in a decaying mansion. The lampshades are knocked askew and the wallpaper is either peeling or bruised. A young woman enters carrying a toy rabbit with human looking eyes and a drum. As she presents the toy to various doors she passes them by but when she comes to one the toy rabbit starts drumming. She opens the door. It leads to a basement. She descends the stairs and listens as the rabbit's drumming variously stops or starts up. She approaches a fresh looking section of wall, finds a tool to saw into it and looks through. Titles.

A young man who seems to be in mental health care is being given a job minding the niece of a dodgy older man. Sounds easy and the pay is good. The closer they get to the site the worse it looks. The house is on an island in a lake and the woman (from the opening sequence) is in a withdrawn state, sitting at the end of her room on the floor, her hands covering her face, seemingly catatonic. Oh, there's something else, the young man, Isaac, has to wear a brace that is connected to a chain that limits his reach in the house. After an argument he relents and puts the brace on as the dodgy man locks it. Ok, see you in a few days.

The rest of the film is a pitted contest between the intense creepiness of the setting and the unnerving actions of the woman, Olga, as she moves around the house in search of something undisclosed or freezes into motionless denial in her room. With nothing beyond this, Isaac tries to work out what the real situation is. As a light but effective electronic score swells around them they are both in for some dark discovery.

At its best this serious and unsettling film works as a strange melange of classic horror writers like M.R. James or Algernon Blackwood and the freezing eeriness of Samuel Beckett plays like Rockaby or Footfalls. This odd mix doesn't lessen even when the more generically horror scenes take place. If anything they are intensified by it. The sense of dread swelling through the rot in the walls mounts by the minute. This is enhanced by the stark and very deliberate high resolution video look which allows a rich colour pallet through does so with such clarity that the detail of it adds to the overall creepiness. The art direction would be overdone in a more generic film (it can look like a horror VR game at times) but here it just adds a painful rawness to the film.

The one aspect that detracts from all of this is the exposition. There are a number of twists which force the film into more conventional genre territory and they feel clumsy by comparison. While these are not as annoying as the exposition scene in Suspiria (which all but crushes the strongly wrought nightmare logic of that film) I wish they'd been under composed. That aside Caveat does rediscover its strength in the silence of its statements and ends with a quiet weight. Did you see and like last year's Relic? You should see and like this.

Currently on Shudder.