There’s a specific kind of British horror where the ghosts and other creatures aren’t even close to being the monster in the building. No relation to Harold Pinter’s classic play of the same name, you have Luke Tedder’s film The Caretaker. The picture gives themes in play like the V.C. Andrews novel series that begins with Flowers in the Attic and sprinkles in moments from the classic psychological horror film The Innocents. This new film is a slow-burning yet surprisingly charged forward picture that gives one enough genuine dread and pitch-black wit to make it worth your time.
Eddie (Ben Probert) shows up at the sprawling coastal private school Lockbridge Academy the way damaged people always show up at isolated institutions in these films because he has nowhere else to go. His monstrously looking and bitter mother just died of long-term illness at Home. Eddie loved her anyway, and now he’s mute from the trauma of becoming homeless. He gets placed at the school due to his Unique character, which includes accommodation with work of maintaining the now vacant premises that’s the size of a small village.
“When the Aberdeens’ secrets finally fully surface, they land somewhere between the realms of incest and institutional power…”
The school is run by the Aberdeen family, which shows the classic example of old money, class structure, and old sin marinate together when unchecked. Charles Aberdeen II (PG Pearson) is the headmaster, all manners, sartorial correctness, and whiskey right out of a ‘Gentleman’s club’ like the Pall Mall. His son Charles III (Scott Hume) smoulders in the deputy role like a man who’s been waiting to inherit the throne since birth and cannot understand the delay. Scott Hume is genuinely poshly vicious playing the role with smarmy, class-entitled loathing with the kind of commitment, while having a vague facial resemblance to the current King Charles and former British PM Rishi Sunak. Lauren Shotton’s Lisa, nominally the art teacher and functionally somewhere between eccentric and unhinged, drifts through the film like she wandered off a different, weirder movie and found this one more interesting. She’s terrific.
Against all this dysfunction, Mackenzie Larsen’s performance as Marie, an American cleaner who is very clearly trying to get out and has been grinding away at law school applications to prove it. Her friendship with the wordless Eddie in the empty summer hallways is lovingly desperate. Two people at the bottom of the food chain find each other.
The horror side of things builds slowly. A missing girl who was a promising artist, whose images keep flickering at the edges of the frame. Eddie’s predecessor, who is in a prologue, ended up drowning in the pool. When the Aberdeens’ secrets finally fully surface, they land somewhere between the realms of incest and institutional power and generations of bad behaviour wrapped in a school crest.
"…that gives one enough genuine dread and pitch-black wit to make it worth your time."
