Writer-director Damien Mc Carthy’s Oddity didn’t have the splashy marketing of, say, Longlegs, but it’s a corking horror you don’t want to miss.
A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Oddity as a British film. It is, of course, Irish. A thousand apologies to the people of Ireland for several hundred years of exactly This Sort of Thing.
Anticipation is the lifeblood of a good horror yarn, and writer-director Damien Mc Carthy creates an ingeniously tense scenario in his low-budget shocker, Oddity. A golem-like wooden effigy sits at a dining table in a spacious yet austere converted barn in a remote part of Ireland. Its mouth is frozen in a silent scream; its hands sit flat on the table as though it’s performing some sort of seance.
For a large chunk of his engagingly twisty narrative, Mc Carthy invites us to wonder: what is this thing? Is it going to move? And if so when, and what will it do?
Taking in just a handful of (largely interior) locations, Oddity feels like a welcome throwback to the quintessentially British-Isles-horror of something like Amicus Productions, a company which also specialised in making economically-minded genre films in the 1960s and 70s. With its talk of haunted objects and vengeful ghosts, it also channels the spirit of the master of the supernatural story, MR James.
Oddity is one of those occasions where it’s better to sit and watch it without too much prior information to distract you, but the broadest possible strokes are these: a well-to-do English psychiatrist, Ted (Gwilym Lee) lives in the aforementioned barn conversion with his new partner, Yana (Caroline Menton). A year earlier, Ted’s wife, Dani (Carolyn Bracken) was murdered under mysterious circumstances by one of the patients who’d recently emerged from the asylum in which Ted works.
On the anniversary of that crime, Dani’s twin sister Darcy (also Bracken), a blind clairvoyant who owns a curiosity shop packed with cursed items, shows up at Ted’s house unannounced. She’s brought a large wooden trunk with her. Inside it: an old family heirloom – a life-size, wooden effigy of a man…
There’s far more to Oddity, but we’ll leave the rest for you to discover. In some respects, the narrative’s logic begins to unravel a bit when subjected to too much scrutiny, but that isn’t really the point of the film anyway: Oddity exists in a sort of dream realm beyond logic where nothing feels real, exactly, and strange, irrational behaviours suddenly seem possible.
Mc Carthy, who previously made his name with his horror debut, Caveat (2020), shot in the same location as Oddity, has said in interviews that his latest work is built up from a collage of little ideas and details he didn’t previously know what to do with. In some respects, this shows: Darcy, with her eerie powers and curiosity shop of clutter, could have been a short film of its own; likewise the almost unbearably tense opening, featuring a unbalanced-seeming stranger and his distracting glass eye. But the disparate nature of these elements works in Mc Carthy’s favour, since the audience is constantly wondering how all of these seemingly disparate threads intertwine and how the filmmaker can possibly pay them off. It hopefully isn’t a spoiler to say Mc Carthy pulls off his conjuring trick superbly.
Even when the viewer might start piecing things together, or picking at little details (would those vents over at the asylum really function in that position on that particular wall…?) the quality of the casting and performances keep us engrossed. Bracken is terrific in two cleanly distinct roles as Dani, a character whose screentime is brief yet pivotal to the plot, and Darcy, who radiates a stern, icy intelligence from behind her pale, sightless eyes.
But then there’s Lee, who with his cut-glass English accent – which stands out from the soothing Irish accents found elsewhere – could have come straight out of an MR James novel. Menton is also great value as Tim’s partner; there’s a great scene in which she sits, arms folded, verbally sparring with Darcy, whose presence she clearly resents (we’d probably feel the same if someone showed up at our house with a creepy life-sized wooden doll).
This year has hardly seen a lack of superb genre films, from the 90s serial killer stylings of Longlegs to the aggressive feminist body horror of The Substance. Quieter and more contained than most of this year’s offerings though it is, Oddity deserves a place in the conversation about 2024’s finest shockers. In issue 52 of Film Stories magazine, we listed Mc Carthy as a genre filmmaker to watch, and for good reason: if this is what he can do with a low budget and a handful of locations, it’ll be fascinating to see what he might make with even slightly expanded resources.
Quirky and at times blackly comic, Oddity’s like one of the items from Darcy’s Cork curiosity shop: compact, unusual, but charged with a sinister, unpredictable energy.
Oddity is available to watch on Shudder now.
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