The Scare Salon

Impressively, it was shot for just £250,000 at Bantry House in West Cork, Ireland, and the setting becomes almost a character in itself, all peeling wallpaper and dank basement corridors. It’s quite a claustrophobic story, having just three characters and almost entirely set in a single house. Still, the buildup of tension is impeccably done, and I was completely sucked in by its bizarre premise and the unfolding mystery of the situation, which takes a while to fully reveal itself.

Keep in mind that if you’re not a fan of good old “slow burn” horror and don’t like stories that leave a lot of things to your imagination or interpretation, then Caveat might not be the movie for you. It’s eerie, nerve-wracking, and weird, but a lot of things about what’s actually going on aren’t stated outright, leaving the viewer to formulate his or her own theories about it. I’ve seen some interesting hypotheses about the movie’s possible backstory or larger overarching narrative (one of which I think is probably the “correct” take), but I’d be curious to hear other people’s perspectives if they’ve seen it and want to discuss it.

As usual, I won’t be spoiling any major plot points here, but I will go a bit into the setup of the story, so if you’d rather go into the movie blind, then watch it first and then come back here. This is another film I’m glad I watched without knowing anything about it, because I had no idea where it was going and it kept me intrigued the entire time. This is your one and only warning.

In the opening scene, a young woman who we later learn is named Olga (Leila Sykes) is creeping around a decrepit old house, holding a very unsettling wind-up rabbit toy in front of her like a divining rod. She holds it up over here, and nothing happens, she holds it up over there, and nothing happens, but when she holds it in front of the basement door, it starts beating its little drum, almost as though it’s warning her of the presence of something unseen. Oh, and when Olga turns her head toward the camera, we see that her nose is bleeding.

The rabbit’s intermittent drumming leads her down into the basement and over to what looks like an old fireplace or small passage that’s been sealed over with sheet rock or something. Olga grabs a little hand saw and cuts a hole in the plaster, peering inside. We don’t see what’s in there (yet), because we then cut to the other two characters.

Isaac (Johnny French) is sitting with a man named Moe Barrett (Ben Caplan). Moe says he visited Isaac in the hospital after his accident, but that Isaac didn’t remember him. From their conversation, we’re able to glean that Isaac is suffering from partial amnesia after whatever this accident was, and that he doesn’t remember being friends with Moe at all. The plot synopsis on Wikipedia says that Moe is also Isaac’s landlord, but I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention because I didn’t pick up on that.

Anyway, Moe has a proposition for Isaac. Moe’s niece, Olga, is staying out at this isolated house after her father killed himself there, and she won’t leave. She’s got some mental problems, Moe explains, and he doesn’t like the thought of her out there alone. Moe offers Isaac 200 pounds a day if he’ll just stay out at the house and keep her company. It will probably only be for about five days or so, he says.

Isaac is pretty wary about this situation, as you would be. He reasonably asks Moe that if he’s so worried about Olga, why doesn’t he just stay out there and look after her himself? Moe says he wouldn’t be able to put up with her for that long, because of her aforementioned psychological issues. The whole thing still sounds kind of sketchy, but Isaac seemingly needs the easy money, so he agrees, though in my favorite edit of the film, he says to Moe, “There must be more to it than that,” or something to that effect, and then there’s a hard cut to the title card reading Caveat. I loved that.

Just as Isaac suspected, there is a bit more to this “job offer” than Moe initially stated. For one thing, the house stands by itself on a tiny island in the middle of a big lake and is only accessible by boat. This puts Isaac on his guard right away, because he can’t swim. Moe tries to reassure him, but Isaac is still uneasy.

When they get to the house, the uneasiness increases tenfold. Moe produces a leather vest/harness thing that’s attached to a really long chain shackled to a steel ring in the basement. He tells Isaac that Olga is really paranoid, is frightened of men, and doesn’t want anyone coming into her room for fear they’ll attack her. Therefore, Isaac must wear this vest—which is locked with a key so he can’t get it off—the whole time he’s there. The chain is long enough for him to get to most places in the house, but it stops just short of Olga’s room.

Isaac naturally balks at this strange stipulation, saying that he had no intention of going into Olga’s room anyway. Moe insists that it’s simply for her peace of mind. Isaac calls Moe out for not stating all this shit up front and says he wants to leave, money be damned. Moe is angry but offers to introduce him to Olga before he makes a decision.

He slowly opens the door to Olga’s room, and she’s sitting on the floor next to the bed with her hands covering her eyes. She doesn’t move or speak and doesn’t appear to hear them. Moe explains that she has schizophrenia, and when she gets “excited,” she goes into these catatonic states where she just shuts down. Moe, rather callously, demonstrates how out of it she is by putting a lampshade on her head, an indignity to which she fails to react at all.

Isaac, seeing Olga and clearly feeling some compassion for her, grudgingly agrees to take the assignment and wear the vest. Moe locks him into it and leaves him at the house, rowing back to the mainland on the only boat.

From the beginning, though, things seem off. Isaac finds a dog chained in the backyard (I was worried, but the dog is fine, thank goodness), and the dog looks very intensely at Isaac, as though there’s something behind him. The lights flicker off back there, and something picks up Isaac’s chain and yanks on it, causing him to stumble backward in his chair. But when he looks behind him, no one is there.

There’s also the matter of a creepy-ass painting in the room he’s sleeping in that keeps falling off the wall and turning itself around when he isn’t looking. The face of the girl in the painting seems to change too, and when Isaac leans close to it, he can hear whispering voices.

Isaac also discovers the rabbit toy and becomes intensely weirded out by the fact that it drums by itself at the same time he senses some invisible presence behind him.

When Olga awakens from her catatonia, she comes into the living room to talk to Isaac, armed with a crossbow. She doesn’t seem threatening, exactly, but she doesn’t seem entirely normal either. Isaac asks her about her father’s suicide, and she tells him that her mother, who was insane, locked him in the basement and swallowed the key, and because he had extreme claustrophobia, he snapped and shot himself in the head with the crossbow. Her mother disappeared ten months ago, she reveals, and when Isaac asks what was done to look for her, Olga says, “Nothing.” The whole conversation is very odd, and I think a lot of things Olga says are oblique references to some larger narrative, only bits of which we discover as the story goes on.

Shortly after, Isaac twigs onto the fact that the rabbit toy is trying to lead him to something, and he ends up at the same basement wall that Olga cut a hole in earlier. Isaac also looks into the hole and sees something pretty horrifying that takes the story in an even more threatening direction.

This is one of those movies where I feel like every shot and every word spoken is important, a piece of a puzzle whose entirety we never see. While we do get some answers, some things are left largely unexplained, which some viewers might find frustrating; I personally didn’t mind at all, because the tantalizing idiosyncracies of the story led to some intense speculation about the meaning of all of it. I can see why so much discussion sprung up about this movie online; it really presents itself as a mystery for the viewer to ponder on and speculate about.

The acting and cinematography are terrific, and the whole vibe of the movie is very ominous, with one visual in particular being so freaky that at one point when it popped up I just went, “NOPE.” The rabbit is also creepy as shit, and probably even more so because it’s never really explained where it came from or why it does what it does (although I have my theories).

This is another stellar example of a film that didn’t need a big budget or a bunch of bells and whistles to be spooky. It takes its time, building its story and atmosphere patiently, and doles out disquieting imagery at occasional intervals. The setup is so weird that you really want to see where it’s going, and even though the movie doesn’t hold your hand, it’s clear that you can figure out what’s going on if you just read between the lines. I tend to really like low-key, dread-filled movies like this, and Caveat was right in my wheelhouse. Whether it will be in yours is another matter, but I thought it was great, uncanny, and strange, and if it sounds like your cup of tea, I would definitely recommend it.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.