Many like myself would have been introduced to malice disguised as kindness by the witch offering Snow White the poisoned apple. It’s unlikely I registered the moment’s significance when I was a child, the simple childish view of a monochrome world, void of moral contradictions was penetrated and made murkier.
For Isaac (Jonathan French), the protagonist in Damian Mc Carthy’s Irish horror film Caveat, a sinister proposal by his landlord risks leading him down a precarious rabbit hole he may never escape. His instincts tell him to be cautious, but the lure of money, coupled with his ego, assures him he can handle the situation.
Caveat is another cautious tale of being wary of propositions that seem too good to be true, and just as Snow White was seduced by the lush red apple, so to is Isaac tempted by the lure of easy money. He agrees to look after his landlord’s niece Olga (Leila Sykes), for a few days. His original suspicions that this was too good to be true are confirmed, when he learns she lives in an isolated house on a remote island, in Cork, Ireland. The only access is by boat, and Isaac can’t swim. Once in the house, he’s then instructed that he must wear a leather harness and chain that restricts his movements to certain rooms.
The stage is set for a story in which a man walks around a strange house. It’s hardly enticing, but Mc Carthy spices it up with a violent game of cat and mouse between Isaac and Olga. Meanwhile, untangling the truth and the lies of what happened to her parents, as well as uncle Barret’s (Ben Caplan) unclear motivations, linger like a fog.
Caveat is an effective and unassuming piece of filmmaking. It’s unlikely to have you racing up to the rooftops to shout about, but it gets under your skin, and it has an aura of cinema of a bygone era. The cuts feel rough and noticeable in moments, echoing the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike the polished look and feel of big budget horror, Caveat’s edit in moments recalls The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), that through the rough aesthetic honoured the anxious and nightmarish ordeals of its character’s reality.
Sitting down to watch a horror film, we enter into a stare-down. The filmmaker dares us to not look away, to listen, unsettling us through sight and sound, but also through narrative should that be a tool at their disposal. Early on Mc Carthy who not only wrote and directed, but edited the film, along with his re-recording mixer, Richard De Mowbray, and sound mixer, Hugo Parvery, deliberately emphasise the diegetic sounds. Richard G. Mitchell’s score is used sparingly, and it heightens our hyper-arousal to sound, triggering our fight or flight instincts of fear. Immersing us in the drama, we are lured down the rabbit hole. We find ourselves disoriented, heightened by an effective use of the image and narrative ambiguity.
Caveat never descends into cheap attempts to frighten us, nor does it refrain from appreciating the value of a well placed jump scare. Transitioning from shock to morbid curiosity, we linger on the horror, familiarising ourselves with the sight, and scrutinising why we should be scared. In the moments following Isaac’s arrival, the suspense gradually builds, and in one playful scene featuring a portrait painting, the director toys with the idea of whether it’s the house or the painting that’s haunted. Later in the film, he follows up a jump scare with the lingering gaze of the camera, before cutting back and forth, creating suspense through our anticipation of what we’re about to see, or what we could see happen.
Mc Carthy is wise enough to understand that it’s a film that will succeed for its atmospheric eeriness, and the complicated relationships between the characters. We must be kept on the cusp, never quite allowed to reach an orgasmic high. He achieves this in part through making Caveat not about the why, but about what happens.
Similar to a dream or a nightmare, the events that unfold seem to make sense, but the motivations of Barret, and what happened in the past remains shrouded in ambiguity. We should also remember that Isaac’s naïve choices that lead him down the rabbit hole, have that eerie feel of peril and despair we find in the dreamscape. We could be forgiven for thinking that Isaac will wake up from a dream, but if he does, it’s after the closing image.
The distrust and paranoia, the tangled up narrative of the past, the ulterior motives, are an echo of our times. Our political system and its figures have erected façades, and Brexit has sown the seeds of division and distrust, anger and frustration. Caveat echoes the rabbit hole of our decrepit reality.
Caveat is streaming exclusively on Shudder from June 3rd.
As with every July 12th, the Orange Marchers cornered the Queen’s avenues of Belfast with the zest of 1690 ringing through the 2019 buildings. It’s a march that symbolises the divisions that exist still in Ireland’s most northerly province. These divisions led to a war, starting in the 1960s, only the shared power-sharing handshakes of The Good Friday Agreement ceased a 30-year conflict. Chaos and conflict have narrative properties, a quality which has been showcased in several films. Though the most galling depictions of The Troubles were saved until the millennium, many fine reflections of conflated conflicted truths found their to the cutting room floors, some telling reflections of Her Majesty’s Government serialised in serial film.
And yet neither the Loyalist nor the Republican Movements acted with great compassion, the torment of war encased in the artillery on both sides. This list neither wags nor holds a finger at the disputatious activities which involved three nations. Rather it seeks to understand the artistry which reflected a war divided over monarchic loyalties, hibernal loyalties and a statement of Northern Irish identity. The impact of a Brexit Vote (which Northern Ireland voted against) may cause a future return to the struggles. For some, reunification seems paramount, for others, an affront to their proud identity. As it stands the first opens in an Ireland preparing, the last in Scotland finishing a war, while the eight impress the haunting conflicts of a residual, never ending battle.
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1. Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, 1970):
The gun toting, bog smoking antics of the Republican movement matches the backdrop of David Lean’s cinematic portraiture, the Kerry landscape wistfully romantic in spirited woodlands. Soldiers and bullets enter the mountainous backdrop as a local married pub lady enters into a liaison with a soldier whose comrades kill her townsmen. David Lean’s pastoral, political spectacle carries a covert change cutting the myriad of masked freedom fighting memories in the backdrop of a Britain awaiting the toll of The Troubles.
Steely in appearance, Robert Mitchum strides as the apprised Charles Shaughnessy, a local teacher whose father in law informs the soldiers from the provincial puissant of his tavern and whose wife sleeps with one of the soldiers Shaughnessy personally and politically opposes. Often unfairly compared to the majesty of Lean’s earlier efforts, Ryan’s Daughter is a seismic work, understated in the historical backdrop Ireland and Britain still share. Gun smuggled capers echo the bordered insanities Irish men experienced in the 1970s, writhing to the efforts of an Empire uninterested and unimpressed with the isles it inhabits. The agrarian agricultural beauty envelopes the romance the fervent fancies Rosy (Sarah Miles) shares with an exhibit of soldiers, waiting to offer their flame fancied pistols.
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2. The Outsider (Tony Luraschi, 1980):
An American ascending from the American dream to a hibernal one, Craig Wesser acts convincingly in the dual role of actor and Vietnam veteran, violently entering the indolent Belfast hovels. Notorious on release, The Outsider suffered the ignominy of being dropped from a London festival after filming in Northern Ireland had proven unsustainable. And yet there’s a power to the film foolishly ignored by the festival goers, crept as it is in crepuscular imagery and masculine fragility. Behind the array of metallic weaponry comes a tale of generational fortitude. Wesser plays the torn-down American, eager to follow his Grandfather’s career in ridding Ireland of a British burden. Then there’s Sterling Hayden, the aged grandparent, burdened with a secret of British platitude.
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3. Maeve (Pat Murphy and John Davies, 1981):
The Irish Times called it “Ireland’s first bona fide feminist film”. If an oversimplification (I’d make a strong case that Ryan’s Daughter pipped it), the story at least understands the struggles of the everyday woman returning from the liberal London lounge-ways for a Belfast betrothed to gender politics. Maeve (Mary Jackson), scarf worn and headstrong, stands in front of a machine gun poking heavy, imbuing the Godardian French Wave milieu in her dress. Director Pat Murphy was a founder of the feminist film and video distribution network Circles, tellingly calling both England and Ireland for their questionable exemplars in gender representation at the turn of the 1980s.
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4. Cal (Pat O’Connor, 1984):
Orange Orders open lacerated words, as Loyalists lacerate young Cal (John Lynch) for his allegiances to the provisional Irish Republican Army. Amidst the towering bombs which batter the broken pebbles they walk comes one of the most deeply romantic movies of the last thirty-five years. Mark Knopfler, a thoughtful Glaswegian entranced in his six strings, soundtracks Helen Mirren, a widowed, willowy ingenue cascaded in her heart strings. Entranced in Marcella’s arms, Cal crosses the threshold of Catholic guilt, slain in his love for her posture, demonstrated in his killings of her slain husband. The leisured love stems from screenwriter’s Bernard MacLaverty’s liturgical prose, learned in the perspective Belfast prisons Cal must enter and Marcella must wade through a doleful dalliance as bested battleground breaks them down.
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5. Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989):
A dawn rises. A car passes. A man turns to his urinal. He’s bulleted into the toiletry fluids, pouring his own bodily blood over his bodily fluid. Alan Clarke’s uncompromising, punchy work works without dialogue, the camera acting out the variety of killings which haunt Northern Ireland on a daily basis. The naturalistic handheld manner of this short film won Clarke plaudits; his producer, Danny Boyle, would direct serial zombie thriller 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) with a very similar setup. Shooting the shootings that come unresolved to the world, Clarke’s observational style called back to Yoko Ono’s late 1960s’ commentary Rape, shocking audiences with a style less glamorous than scurrilous. It’s largely silent, though take warning. Some of the killings are deafening in their protrusion.
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6. In The Name Of The Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993):
Daniel Day Lewis won three Oscars, one as a paraplegic writer, one as a Western Oil Baron, one as America’s liberator of slavery. Yet Day Lewis never gave as fiery a performance as he did incarcerating the incarcerated emotions he endeavoured through Gerry Conlon’s real life trajectory. Arrested as one of The Guilford Four, Conlon was jailed in 1975, wrongfully sentenced for fifteen years as a supposed Provisional IRA bomber. Sinewy in appearance, leathery in hair, Day Lewis walks with rock assurance during the film’s telling climax, the pathway to a journalist rimmed front door a small solace after fifteen years a wronged convict. Emma Thompson works remarkably in her appearance as Conlon’s trusted lawyer, while Pete Postlethwaite wades in his cell as the dejected Giuseppe Conlon. Where Day Lewis gives his best, so does Postlethwaite, two brilliant English actors with impeccable Northern Irish diction. Fittingly, Postlethwaite’s final performance came as Fergus Colm, the callous Irish crime lord in Ben Affleck’s excellent The Town.
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7. The Informant (Jim McBride, 1997):
Before Harvey Weinstein shocked the world with professed lechery, he shocked the film world when the lightweight Shakespeare In Love (John Madden) championed the astonishing Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg) for the 1998 Best Picture Award. In the midst came an unvarnished showtime movie, dedicated to showcasing the trichotomy of male perspective. The capricious Gingy (Anthony Brophy) must stand against his IRA compeers to work with, beside and for the will of an English Lieutenant (Cary Elwes) and a proud Protestant detective (the hoary Timothy Dalton) in a war none will ultimately win.
“The movie is important, because it exposes the complete abdication of morality that happens when two nations go to war” the two-time Bond recalled. “Most people believe, in a war, that one side’s bad and one side’s good. But the minute you go to war, the rules go out the window and both sides become bad.”
In a Dublin licked up to explore the battle beaten Belfast, Jim McBride’s exploration into the human spirit examines the why’s, how’s and who’s of the conflict, relegated to television at a time when no major distributor would have promoted the film. And yet there’s a telling humanity to the proceedings, not least when Maria Lennon’s Roísín berates Dalton’s DCI Rennie for recruiting Catholic women for sexual pleasure.
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8. Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, 2002):
Audiences who knew James Nesbitt as the unflappable lead from the comic Cold Feet could scarcely imagine the depth, nuance, stealth and steel he’d bring as the real life Ivan Cooper. A proud Presbyterian unaware of the circumstances behind Bloody Sunday, Nesbitt took to reading the script while filming another project in Manchester. It moved him as effectively as he moved his audiences in what’s arguably the performance of his life. Detailing the real life tragedy of a peaceful protest, the paramilitary killings outraged many in Britain. Vanessa Redgrave marched for resolution, Paul McCartney issued a musical statement, U2 commemorated the song in one of their more potent pieces. Fittingly, Bono’s voice closes the film with gravitas.
“I’ve seen the film six times now,” the real life Cooper revealed “And my first thoughts were that it was an emotional experience. I’m able to say with confidence that it was made with great integrity.”
Helmed by director Paul Greengrass, the film’s naturalistic style of filming added a padding of telling realism, driving viewers into the middle of the senseless 1972 killings. Hollywood took notice of his skill: Greengrass earned his place as Jason Bourne (2016) director largely on the strength of Bloody Sunday.
Bloody Sunday is also pictured at the top of this article.
9. Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008):
One take. A 17-minute, unending, uncompromising take. The priest talks of God, the prisoner talks of country. Steve McQueen’s first, finest and most harrowing work came from the true life horror stories from the HM Prison Maze, innocent by-standing men stripped by their dignities by a Government shadowed overseas. Just as it took an English director to paint the atrocities of Bloody Sunday, another brilliantly ambitious English man saw the truth in the sullied cells which starved the intellect of its prisoners as harshly as they starved their bodies. We could write an entire article on why this film should be remembered, but instead I’ll focus on sinewy dialogue, Michael Fassbender’s Bobby Sands and Liam Cunningham’s Father Dominic Moran exchanging sharp words, cutting in their veneer, tense in their timing. Involving, issue non resolving, the scene sits in solemn penance, one long take with few of the pyrotechnics employed throughout Birdman. Staggering.
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10. The Journey (Nick Hamm, 2016):
It started with the barbed shot, it ended with the barbed retort. The Journey chronicles the voyage Republicanism and Unionism joined, fittingly embodied in a taxi driven by an impartial driver. Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall star as Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley, two political combatants who worked in close collaboration to steer their shared country through the devolution of power in the region. Brilliant and bathetically, the claustrophobic taxi’s engine mirrors the distressed sounds a battle ground surrounded these two men. The furnished Scottish woodlands echoes the planted fears these men share. As a reverend, McGuinness sees Paisley’s position as more polemic than parochial. As a former member of the Irish Republican Army, Paisley sees McGuinness’s political convictions with criminal conviction. Meaney paid tribute to McGuinness in a 2017 Guardian, a man whose demise followed the real life Paisley’s. And yet the film attributes and pays tribute to the figureheads, whose shared journey lead to a safer home neither of them experienced.
Rosie Davis’s only fault is that she and her partner, John Paul, can’t afford to stay in their house. The landlord wants to upgrade the property and let it out at a higher rent. Indeed, Rosie and John Paul find it difficult with their four children to afford alternative accommodation around the bleak suburbs of Dublin where they live.
This film records 48 hours in Rosie and her children’s life as she hauls them around Dublin in her modest car, desperately trying to find accommodation for the night in a hotel, trying, if she has got the time, to find a new home, look after the children, dropping them off and collecting them from school, pretending all the while that she is just in between addresses and coping fine. John Paul is busy working in a restaurant earning money for the family and joining them in the evening wherever Rosie has managed to find a place.
This is cinema verité at its best. With a razor-sharp accurate screenplay by Roddy Doyle you almost feel that you are in Rosie’s car with the family. In the damp, chilly climate of Ireland, the windows steam up in the car and the children draw pictures on it and you can almost feel the chill and the damp and the brave despair of the family as they trudge around Dublin. The minutiae of childcare, the dropping of a toy, the children suddenly needing the toilet, rescuing “Peachy”, a favourite toy from the car, Alfie bouncing on a hotel bed or playing with his toy cars in a hotel corridor, all are faithfully recorded while Rosie has somehow got to negotiate the family’s future on her mobile.
Millie, the second daughter, is called “Smelly Millie” by the other girls at school because she hasn’t had a fresh change of clothing. Rosie must quickly attend to that. The eldest daughter Kayleigh decides to have a sleepover with a friend from school but fails to tell Rosie provoking a panic that she has gone missing and causing John Paul to leave work to his boss’s annoyance.
They go back briefly to their old home where Alfie discovers that their old trampoline is still standing in the back garden and proceeds to bounce joyfully on it. Rosie must drag him struggling from it in a poignant scene that underlines how much the family has lost. The family find a place in a hotel on the first night but, with all the distractions on the second day, fail to do so on the second night. They end up spending a miserable night in the car within sight of their old home, with John Paul sleeping outside so that the children can settle.
This is bang up-to-date modern Ireland. Rosie and John Paul are unmarried partners just like their English counterparts. There is not a nun or priest in sight. No Irish eyes are smiling. There is no “craic” (fun) in the pub. This is more the world of Angela’s Ashes (by Frank McCourt) and the dark side of the Celtic Tiger, which is definitely not roaring. Behind Rosie, which increases her desperation, is the fact that in a country, which had been so dispossessed by others, the dispossessed are nevertheless not respected and, if you are suspected of falling below a certain line of respectability, you are ruthlessly marginalised. The history of Irish orphanages, homes for single mothers, attitudes toward travellers and street people bear witness to that. This is why Millie must not be smelly. The family risks being outcasts.
This is brave and compassionate cinema, produced by RTE, Ireland’s public broadcasting corporation. It has an excellent cast and is well up to the accurate standards of Roddy Doyle. This film won’t have them queuing round the block. It is not entertainment, but it deserves to be seen for its compassion, its depiction of real life and how horrible it is to be caught on the wrong end of the capitalist system.
Rosie is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 8th.
