Subtle horror, usually involving various ghosties and curses, can often prove to be a mixed bag if not handled right. Go too subtle and you might avoid the horror altogether as your deliberate pace and long periods of silence stir uncomfortable shifting due to boredom rather than creeping dread, but if you shatter your spell with a sudden lack of subtlety, then you ruin all the hard work you’ve put into building your oppressive atmosphere. However, treading this tightrope with all the assured grace of a Soviet era gymnast is Damian Mc Carthy’s Oddity, a dark tale of ghosts, blind psychics and just desserts that not only manages to play the slow burn game magnificently, but manages to deal with the subject of haunted artifacts in genuinely unnerving ways that effortlessly puts your average Conjuring spinoff to shame.
Quiet, reserved and utterly engrossing, it’s time to delve into a twisted case of murder that can only solved with wit, nerve – and a lifesize wooden carving of a screaming man…
Trust me, things will get odd.
Psychiatrist Ted Timmis and his wife, Dani Odello-Timmis have sunk a sizable amount of funds into fixing up a remote country house in Ireland, but one night, while Dani is camping out within the unfinished home alone, hoping to catch a sight of a random ghost or two, there’s a knock on her door. It turns out to be Olin Boone, a former patient of the psychiatric hospital where Ted works who had only been discharged earlier in the week. He urgently claims he’s turned up at Dani’s home to help and gives her the rather alarming news that he’s just witnessed a stranger sneak into her house unseen while she was outside fiddling around in her car and Dani finds thatcdhe has a rather worrying conundrum on her hands. If she let’s the stranger in to help, he could be lying – but if he isn’t, she’s sharing her home with an intruder who probably has some malicious intent…
Whatever she chose, we find out a year later that it was obviously wrong and she was brutally murdered that night by an assailant who was strongly believed to be Boone, but after he has his skull messily pulped by a mystery attacker, it seems that the case is finally at rest. However, one person that has her doubts is Dani’s twin sister, Darcy, who can’t quite put the murder of her sister to bed, but she hopes to end that when Ted brings her Boone’s glass eye that was recovered from the scene. While this may sound rather macabre, there is a method to Darcy’s madness because, as a blind woman who not only has clairvoyant abilities, but boasts psychometric powers as well, she can use the eye to feel what her sister’s killer felt when he died in such a gruesome fashion. However, when her suspicions are aroused by some inconsistencies, she vows to get to the bottom of things once and for all. It also helps that the store she runs, Oddities, specialises in various cursed knick knacks that not only will aid her investigation, but will supply her with the vengence she so desperately needs.
There’s been a fair few horror flicks this year that’s traded heavily on creating a tight feeling of choking dread as it weaves a strange tale of bizarre horror, but Damian Mc Carthy’s Oddity manages to stand out from the pack by pulling of the neat trick of delivering a movie that pretty much goes exactly how you expect it to, yet still remains utterly surprising from beginning to end. If I had to describe what I think Mc Carthy is shooting for, I’d have to say he’s given us the basics of one of those EC Comics type of stories where complicated crimes of passion are slowly avenged by a random inclusion of a supernatural presence – on top of that, the inclusion of a shop full of cursed items that’s run by blind psychic seems to want to lean into the realms of the forever expanding Conjuring universe However, to just declare this little masterpiece as just a more sober version of a Takes From The Crypt story, or a more refined Annabelle movie wouldn’t even hope to scratch the surface of this film at all as it unfurls its plot in various installments that drip feeds you vital information when – and only when – it makes the most impact. Remember when you first saw Barbarian and the movie kept shifting gears along with its time line in order to keep you utterly in the dark about what was going on until the last possible moment? That’s kind of what Oddity does, but while Zach Cregger’s barn stormer of a film used this in deliberately jarring fashion, Mc Carthy hands out scraps of explanations in a much smoother manner that leads you down it’s awesomely winding path with talking down to you at all.
As the movie throws a superlative opening sequence at you that’s seemingly more slasher than supernatural, we get the feeling we’re immediately in the director’s firm grasp as he leaves the scene in a cliffhanger that seems to fill us in on events a year later. From here the film starts opening up what we think we know as we are introduced our players, but immediately we’re dropped in a world of suspicion when things take a weird turn immediately after being introduced to our kooky lead, Darcy. From here, things start to tangle and everyone seems guilty of something the very second we meet them – but that’s the gag, it’s not the who that the movie obsessed with, but the how.
It’s here that Oddity ensnares us as we wait to see who is going to be found out and by watch means and it helps that the actors involved play their parts perfectly.
Cream of the crop is Carolyn Bracken who gets to stretch her range in a dual role by playing both Darcy and Dani as about as differently as you can – but while the later is a rather normal, everyday sort, Darcy is a glacial weirdo, equal parts Tilda Swinton’s cut glass delivery mixed with Gwendoline Christie’s hair stylist and you can tell that the actress is loving figging her nails into just a strange, campaigner for justice. However, while the whodunit nature of the story is impeccably paced and gripping to boot, what really pushes Oddity into the big leagues is the way the movie handles the scares and supernatural aspects of the film. The jump scares are nicely spaced out, devilishly well-timed and intelligently handled with a couple in particular managing to succeed in making full body spasm in shock as a face suddenly appears where you don’t expect it or a stationary object abruptly changes position when you weren’t looking.
Speaking of stationary objects, no review of Oddity can occur without a few gushing paragraphs or two concerning the film’s striking poster boy – the life size wooden mannequin “gifted” to Ted by Darcy whose face is frozen in a silent eternal scream. Not only is the thing unnerving as fuck, but the details about it take on almost Clive Barker levels of grim fasinaction when Tim’s new bride to be starts finding strange things hidden in the small compartments located in the back of its head. It’s this level of detail that give the spookier aspects of the movie a sense of legitimacy that lend the ominous felling of dread a real clout – even if nothing is actually happening.
As I alluded to before, there’s a very good chance that you figure out who is precisely responsible for what before the film enlightens you, but Oddity manages to keep you on the edge so much, it doesn’t actually matter much thanks to some perfectly molded creeps and a genuinely unnerving mannequin that almost runs away with the movie despite being practically static.
Now wooden that be odd?
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