Damian McCarthy’s Oddity is a clever, sleek, creepy film. Looking back on it and knowing that it didn’t have much to work with, I can see where the nips and tucks were made in the budget, especially re: the size of the cast, but this looks fantastic. It doesn’t feel cheap, just intimate. This is a true must-see among recent horror movies: stylish without being empty, smart without showing off, always engaging, never ponderous, possessed of tremendous affection for its genre, and–best of all–genuinely scary.
In the opening, we meet Dani (Carolyn Bracken), who is fixing up the isolated castle-like house she shares with her husband, Ted (Gwilym Lee), who works at a local (and extremely Gothic) psychiatric hospital–and whose recently discharged patient, Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy), comes knocking one night when Dani is home alone. When she went to her car, Olin says, she left the door open, and someone ran into the house. She’s not safe. Will she let him in to take a look around?
Dani dies that night, and most of Oddity takes place a year later and focuses on Dani’s elegant, intense twin sister, Darcy, an antique shop owner and psychic (of the “touch a personal object, divine its history and the secrets of owner” variety) whose life and career have left her well-acquainted with bitterness, hard choices, and supernatural terrors. When Ted pays her a surprise visit to give her the now-deceased Olin Boole’s glass eye, as she had requested of him, Darcy’s initial pleasure at their reunion develops into something pricklier and more complicated. Ted, she learns, already has a new live-in girlfriend, pharmaceutical sales rep Yana (Caroline Menton), so she has a hard time believing that his grief is still as deep as hers–if indeed it ever was. When she communes with the glass eye, her demeanor changes further still. Soon she’s at Ted and Yana’s door, bearing a gift of her own: the most outrageously creepy wooden doll you can imagine.
At first, I thought that Oddity was just a shade guilty of getting off on being withholding, since certain key scenes–Dani’s and Olin’s deaths–are at first intentionally obscured. But this ambiguity is purposeful and meaningful, and when the answers eventually come, they have incredible weight. (What happens with Dani was actively keeping me up the other night. Talk about playing symphonies on your nerve endings.) This is actually a well-plotted movie that knows how to make its unusual story structure as effective and entertaining as its scares. And just as a bonus, it’s often funny as well: there’s a bit of back-and-forth here that is almost It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia-like in its brand of dark humor. Indeed, Oddity is full of things that just plain work, and its sheer skill and enjoyment at what it’s doing lend it a real exuberance. While not innovative–it’s not trying to be–it feels simultaneously classic and fresh.
Oddity is streaming on Shudder.
