Caveat (2020) 🐰

A slow-burn nightmare with a bunny drum, a chain, and one corpse reveal that lives rent-free in my head

⚠️ Content Warning: This review talks about disturbing imagery, dead bodies, psychological horror, decay, trauma, murder, and some genuinely creepy nightmare fuel.

Let’s start by showing y’all the trailer shall we?

Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

Caveat is directed by Damian McCarthy, and yeah, this was his feature debut before he later went on to direct Oddity. And looking at Caveat now, you can absolutely see the DNA of what kind of horror director he is. This man loves creepy objects, creepy houses, creepy silence, and apparently creepy bunnies because good lord, what is his obsession with these things?

The movie follows Isaac (Jonathan French), a man with memory problems who gets hired by Barrett (Ben Caplan) to watch over his niece Olga (Leila Sykes) in a remote, isolated house. Already that setup sounds sketchy. “Hey, come watch my mentally unstable niece in a creepy house on an island.” Yeah, totally normal. Nothing suspicious there. I’m sure this will go great.

But then the movie adds the big “caveat,” because Isaac is told he has to wear this leather harness attached to a chain that limits where he can go in the house. And that is where the movie immediately becomes uncomfortable. It’s not just a haunted house movie. It’s a trapped-in-a-haunted-house movie where the main character literally agrees to be chained up like some kind of horror movie idiot. And to be fair, he needs the money and doesn’t fully understand what he’s walking into, but still. Buddy. No. Leave.

The house itself feels rotten. Not just physically, but emotionally. It feels like the walls are soaked in secrets. Everything looks damp, cold, dirty, and dead. It’s not a pretty haunted house. It’s not gothic in a fancy mansion way. It’s more like if depression became a building and someone forgot to turn the lights on.

Character Rundown

Isaac (Jonathan French) is the main character, and he works because he feels lost from the beginning. He’s not some brave horror hero. He’s confused, desperate, and clearly carrying damage he doesn’t fully understand. His memory issues make the whole movie feel even more off because we are basically trapped in the same confusion he is. He doesn’t know what happened before, we don’t know what happened before, and the house feels like it knows way more than both of us.

Olga (Leila Sykes) is creepy, damaged, and unpredictable. She isn’t just “crazy girl in spooky house,” even though the movie definitely plays with that energy. She feels like someone who has been swallowed by trauma and isolation. She’s quiet, strange, and dangerous, especially once the crossbow gets involved. And again, because this movie is already weird enough, yes, she has a crossbow. Because apparently being chained to a wall in a creepy house wasn’t enough. We needed medieval weapon anxiety too.

Barrett (Ben Caplan) is the kind of character where every sentence out of his mouth feels like a red flag wearing another red flag as a hat. He brings Isaac into this whole situation, explains barely enough to get him trapped, and then leaves him there. He feels slimy without needing to be cartoonishly evil. You just know something is wrong with him. The second he starts explaining the job, I’m like, “Nope. This man has definitely buried context somewhere.”

And then there is the mother, played by Inma Pavon, who is more of a presence than a traditional character, but oh my god, her presence is one of the most disturbing parts of the whole movie. That corpse reveal is insane. We’ll get there. Trust me, we will get there.

Pacing / Episode Flow

This movie is slow. Like, really slow. And that is probably my biggest issue with it.

I get what Damian McCarthy is doing. This movie is not trying to be a fast horror ride. It’s not trying to throw jump scare after jump scare at you. It wants to crawl under your skin. It wants you to sit in silence. It wants you to feel trapped in that house with Isaac. And I respect that.

But at the same time, it is a little too slow for my taste.

There are long stretches where the movie is just letting the atmosphere breathe, and sometimes that works beautifully. Other times, I’m sitting there like, okay, I get it. The house is creepy. The bunny is creepy. The chain is creepy. Everyone here needs therapy and probably a building inspector. Can we move forward a little bit?

That’s why this isn’t one of my favorite horror movies. I like it. I respect it. I think it has some fantastic horror moments. But it is not the kind of movie I would throw on all the time. You have to be in the mood for this kind of slow-burn horror. This is not popcorn horror. This is “sit in a dark room and feel gross for 90 minutes” horror.

Pros

The atmosphere is easily one of the best parts of Caveat. This movie feels nasty in a very specific way. Not nasty like gore everywhere, but nasty like the air in the house is bad. Like if you touched the walls, your hand would come away cold and dirty. The whole movie has this damp, moldy, suffocating feeling.

The cinematography is also very different from a lot of horror movies I’ve seen. I don’t even know how to fully describe it, but it feels tight and boxed-in. The camera doesn’t make the house feel big. It makes it feel like the walls are closing in. A lot of shots feel dim, narrow, and uncomfortable. It’s like the movie is visually trapping you before the chain even does. You always feel like something is just outside the frame, or behind a wall, or sitting in the dark waiting for you to notice it.

And then there is that stupid creepy bunny.

That toy rabbit with the drum is one of those horror props that sounds ridiculous when you explain it out loud, but in the movie it works. It is so simple, but it is so unnerving. It doesn’t need to run at anyone. It doesn’t need to talk. It just sits there and drums like it knows something. And that is what makes it creepy. It feels like a warning system from hell.

Damian McCarthy clearly likes horror objects. In Caveat, it’s the bunny. In Oddity, he keeps playing with creepy objects and unnatural stillness. He has a very specific style. His horror is not loud most of the time. It’s quiet, cold, and deeply wrong. He likes making normal things feel cursed. And honestly, he is good at it.

Cons

The biggest con is still the pacing. I can handle slow horror, but this movie does push it. There are times where it feels like it is daring you to get impatient. And I did. I won’t lie.

Some parts also feel vague in a way that works for the atmosphere but can also be frustrating. The movie gives you enough to understand what happened, but it also likes keeping things murky. That can be effective, but if you’re someone who wants a clean explanation for every single detail, this movie might make you go, “Okay, so are we explaining this or just vibing in trauma fog?”

And Isaac agreeing to the job is one of those horror setups where you kind of have to accept the premise or the movie doesn’t happen. Because once someone says, “You have to wear this chain harness in the house,” most normal people would leave so fast they’d leave a cartoon dust cloud behind. But again, horror movie logic. We need the man chained up or we don’t have a movie.

Final Thoughts

Caveat is not one of my favorite horror movies, but I do think it is a really strong, disturbing slow-burn horror film. It has a very specific mood, and it commits to that mood all the way through. It is creepy, uncomfortable, and honestly pretty unforgettable in certain moments.

I will say I do like and respect that Damian Mc Carthy is making his own horror movies be tied into Irish folklore, i have to give major respects. But I might not be a fan of his work. Because I don’t really care much for this movie to say it’s my favorite and I did not really like his movie, Oddity.

This is the kind of horror movie that doesn’t fully scare you while you’re watching every second of it, but then one scene gets stuck in your head and decides to live there forever like an unpaid tenant.

And for me, that scene is the basement corpse reveal.

That one moment alone is nightmare fuel.

Rating

8/10

Too slow for my personal taste, but the atmosphere, disturbing imagery, cinematography, and that corpse reveal make it absolutely worth watching.

⚠️ Spoiler Warning

From this point on, I’m going into full spoilers. And yes, we are talking about the wall corpse scene because how could I not?

Spoilers

The deeper Isaac gets into the house, the more the whole thing starts feeling like a trap that was waiting for him before he even arrived. The chain around him is already terrifying because it limits where he can go, but the house itself feels like another chain. Every hallway, every room, every dark corner feels like it’s pulling him further into something he should have never agreed to.

And then the movie starts slowly revealing the family history. The mother is dead. The father is dead. Olga is traumatized. Barrett knows more than he is saying. Isaac’s memory is damaged, and the movie slowly uses that to show that he wasn’t just randomly brought into this situation. He has a connection to what happened, even if he can’t remember all of it.

That is what makes the movie unsettling. It isn’t just “man gets hired for creepy job.” It’s “man gets hired for creepy job and realizes he might already be part of the nightmare.”

But the scene that absolutely sticks out, and I mean sticks out like a cursed image burned into my brain, is when Isaac goes into the basement and finds the hole in the wall behind the painting.

This scene is so simple, but it is horrifying.

He moves the painting, sees the hole, shines the flashlight inside, and there she is. The rotting corpse of Olga’s mother. Just sitting there. Hidden in the wall. Eyes open. Staring.

No thank you.

That image is disgusting and terrifying because it doesn’t feel like a cheap jump scare. It feels like something you were never supposed to see. It’s the kind of horror where your brain needs a second to process what it’s looking at, and then once it does, it gets worse. Because she isn’t just dead. She is positioned in this awful, unnatural way, like the house has been keeping her there. And the open eyes make it ten times worse. Dead bodies with open eyes in horror already bother me, but this one? This one feels personal. It feels like she is still accusing the house. Or Isaac. Or everyone.

That is the moment where the movie goes from creepy to genuinely disturbing for me.

And the worst part is how quiet it is. The movie doesn’t need to go insane with music. It doesn’t need some giant monster screaming. It just shows you the corpse and lets the image do the damage. That is why it works. That is why it stuck with me.

Then you have the bunny drum toy, which keeps getting used like some cursed warning device. It points toward danger, it drums when something is wrong, and it makes the entire movie feel like a twisted children’s nightmare. Again, Damian McCarthy and bunnies. I don’t know what happened to this man involving rabbits, but he clearly looked at one and went, “Yeah, that’s horror now.”

The ending also keeps the movie nasty. Isaac ends up trapped behind the wall, basically put into the same kind of nightmare space where the mother’s corpse was hidden. That is such a cruel ending because the movie loops back on itself. He found the horror in the wall, and now he becomes part of the horror in the wall. It’s not clean. It’s not comforting. It’s not the kind of ending where everyone walks away and learns a lesson.

It’s just bleak.

And that fits the movie. Caveat is not trying to make you feel good. It’s trying to make you feel trapped, confused, and disturbed. It’s horror built on silence, guilt, dead spaces, and awful discoveries.

Again, it is too slow for me to call it one of my favorites. But I can’t deny how effective it is. Especially that corpse reveal. That scene alone proves Damian McCarthy knows how to create an image that crawls into your head and stays there.

Would I rewatch it all the time? No.

Do I respect it? Absolutely.

Did that mother corpse scene ruin my peace for a little bit? Yes.

And honestly, that’s horror doing its job.