davidehrlich’s review published on Letterboxd:
Here’s a free bit of life advice: If someone offers you money to babysit their disturbed adult niece in the remote County Cork house where her father recently killed himself, don’t take it. Isaac (memorable newcomer Jonathan French) knows there has to be a catch, but paying gigs are few and far between for an institutionalized drifter who suffers from memory loss, and his potential employer Moe (Ben Caplan) claims to be an old friend. It’s worth noting that he doesn’t claim to be a very good one.
As we already suspect — and as Isaac learns the hard way — the title of Irish filmmaker Damian Mc Carthy’s “Caveat” wryly undersells the dangers at hand. The first red flag is the house is located on the middle of its own tiny island in the middle of nowhere. Even more alarming: Isaac reveals that he doesn’t know how to swim.
It’s the second asterisk that would probably inspire most people, no matter how cash-strapped, to seek other opportunities: Moe’s twentysomething niece Olga (an opaque yet believably dangerous Leila Sykes) has a fear of being attacked in her sleep, so Isaac will be leashed to a thick chain that doesn’t extend far enough to access her bedroom. Or the toilet. Oh, and the key that unlocks the medieval leather vest that Isaac is forced to wear as a harness? You don’t even want to know where it’s hidden. “Every job has a uniform,” Moe insists.
For a horror movie about a man who’s tethered in place, “Caveat” requires a lot of slack to accept its premise and collect its three major characters in the same place. Even so, Mc Carthy’s debut is so eerie and unnerving moment by moment that the devious design largely snuffs out the strained logic. That wicked sense of tension doesn’t pave all the vagaries of Mc Carthy’s plot, which is a puzzle that grows harder to solve with each new piece. That’s frustrating in a film with an ambiguous relationship to the supernatural, and is often lit (or not) in a way that makes it difficult to see what’s happening. But if Olga’s mysteries are still out of reach after the movie’s befuddling last shot, the mildewed claustrophobia of her super creepy island house only sinks deeper under your skin the longer you’re trapped there.