Caveat
Interesting perspective coming to Damian McCarthy’s first film after having already seen the next two. A lot of overlap, particularly with Hokum. The setup is so absurd that it’s hard to get past and take on its own merits. I had to look up their relationship, because it isn’t clear and also doesn’t really matter, but landlord Barrett hires his old tenant Isaac to effectively babysit his niece Olga for a few days at £200 a day. She is a fully grown adult, and what goes unmentioned until arrival is that a) she’s severely mentally ill and has a crossbow, b) her house is on an island with nothing else on it, and c) Isaac has to wear a harness that is chained to a peg in the basement that restricts which rooms he can enter in the house.
Once again, or rather first, McCarthy has a basement where creepy murder happened. In this case, we discover early-ish that Olga’s mother’s body is walled in at the back of it. The best scene in the whole thing takes place here, when Isaac climbs through the Jeffreys tubes to find himself trying to saw his way out of that nook by torchlight, while continually glancing over at the body. There’s some cat and mouse with Isaac and Olga, and she even manages to get stuck in the harness for a while. Barrett, of course, is behind the whole thing because now I’ve come to expect that there’s a guy who did one murder and then is totally fine doing multiple subsequent murders to follow it up.
I’m not even clear on why he did the original murder, but even prior to that he had a ludicrous plan (that somehow worked) to lock his brother in the basement because he (the brother) was so claustrophobic he would immediately kill himself. This nonsense works despite the basement itself being bigger than most studio flats, and having what seems to be a separate entrance. Also this brother plan was carried out by Isaac himself - I think, genuinely can’t tell if it was the same guy with no beard - who then got pitched over a balcony and lost his memory. I’ve no idea what anyone’s motivation is in this. There’s a little drumming rabbit toy that points out dead bodies, as far as I can tell, but it does not meaningfully impact the plot.
I would forgive a lot of this if it was scary (like Oddity’s statue), but aside from the sawing out of a corpse hole scene, there’s not much to raise the pulse. The scenario seems organised around getting some cool set pieces, but they don’t pay off enough.