Oddity

In spite of its title, Irish director Damian McCarthy’s latest film Oddity is more familiar than strange—a classic whodunit couched in a haunted-house story with a touch of Gothic—steeped in generic conventions that are tailor-made to scare. Its few settings—a stone house in the middle of nowhere, a dreary curio shop, and a poorly run mental institution—are inherently creepy, dimly lit locales. The house is the same that was used in McCarthy’s previous feature, Caveat (2020), yet here it is unrecognizable, no longer run-down and claustrophobic but spacious and renovated. At the start of Oddity, Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is doing repairs on the raw space, before she is brutally murdered by a mysterious intruder, and the action jumps ahead one year, when the home improvements are complete. Now, her husband, Ted Timmis (Gwilym Lee), a doctor at the institution, has a new girlfriend, Yana (Caroline Menton), a pharmaceutical rep who may or may not have dated Dani’s husband while she was still alive. Dani’s twin sister Darcy (a white-haired Bracken, playing her second role with gusto) is a blind woman with psychic powers—she is able to learn things about people by “reading” their personal objects. In her bizarre curio shop, she touches the glass eye of the man who supposedly killed her sister and discovers that there is more to the story than previously assumed.

Compared to Caveat, which has a slightly jumbled backstory, the plot of Oddity is more streamlined, with a traditional mystery at its core that is perhaps a little too easy to solve. There are some jumps back and forth in time, but the transitions are clean and the story unravels nicely, leaving room for plenty of effective scares. Working with small budgets, McCarthy has now established himself as a master of horrific prop work, having elicited terror throughout Caveat with a decrepit toy bunny and a wide-eyed woman’s corpse. In Oddity, a life-size wooden doll, its mouth stretched into a gruesome rictus, steals the show. And the bunny from Caveat makes a cameo appearance on a shelf in Darcy’s store, indicating a Conjuring-like connection between the two films. Cinematographer Colm Hogan hesitates to show the wooden doll in close-up, preferring instead to let him lurk in the background, sitting stationary at the dinner table. Its visage is so appalling that each close-up is highly unnerving and any change in its position or appearance initiates a sudden shock.