Unsettling, creepy, and genuinely frightening, Damian McCarthy’s new film Oddity lives up to its title in the best of ways.
McCarthy’s first film was Caveat, a sinister film about a man tasked with caring for a troubled woman in an old house on an isolated island. While it had some frightening aspects to it, it felt a bit like a combination of scary ideas rolled up into one big head-scratcher.
McCarthy also mixes many ideas with Oddity, but somehow, these disparate elements work as one big, unnerving whole.
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Combining a slasher movie, ghost story, creepy wooden mannequin, mental hospital, and a blind medium who happens to be the twin sister of a woman who has been murdered, you’re in for what could have been a convoluted mess. Thankfully, it works effortlessly, making the film itself an oddity of its own.
The film stars Carolyn Bracken as Dani, a young woman who has just moved into a fixer-upper stone house in the Irish countryside. Her husband, Ted (Gwilym Lee), is a psychiatrist at a local mental hospital and spends most of his nights working. This leaves Dani alone in an eerie new home with terrible phone reception. Of course it does!
One night, she encounters a glass-eyed stranger at her door (Tadhg Murphy) who insists he saw someone enter her house while she was outside looking for her phone. He asks to be let in to check and keep her safe. What happens next is revealed later, but suffice it to say she is killed, which begins our story.
We jump to a year later, and Ted has a new girlfriend, Yana (Kate Winslet look-a-like Caroline Menton), and still lives in the same home, albeit it has been (mostly) renovated. Meanwhile, Ted visits Dani’s twin sister Darcy (also Bracken), a local medium who owns a cursed curio shop and can read the past by touching personal objects. Skeptic as he is, he brings her an object that might help in figuring out what really happened to her sister, and that object eventually causes her to visit him at his home.
What happens next is a horrific mystery that includes a chain of terrifying events all revolving around what occurred the night Dani was murdered.
McCarthy has crafted a truly spooky film, complete with very effective jump-scares that will raise the hair on your neck and have you peering around the corners of your own home. He deftly defies horror movie expectations, and while one central reveal isn’t all that alarming, there are bountiful surprises surrounding it.
One of the key horrors of the film is a horrific wooden mannequin—a family heirloom that Darcy gifts Ted. The thing is life-size and truly terrifying, and it has a habit of changing location and position all by itself.
The cast here is uniformly terrific, with Bracken’s dual role a treat to watch. The two sisters are so different from each other, and watching Bracken masterfully inhabit each of them is fascinating.
McCarthy writes new girlfriend, Yana, as a highly unlikeable character, but he also doesn’t make her a damsel in distress. Even with the creepy mannequin sitting at the dining room table for hours at a time, Yana is the type of gal who starts investigating it – even when she’s not so sure it isn’t perhaps a bit otherworldly.
While McCarthy does fill his movie with a lot of ideas, they all come together in a spinetingling and satisfying way. This could be a breakout film for the summer if IFC does it work to get butts in the seats to watch it. Oddity is genuinely one of the best horror films of the past year and a true gift for horror fans.
Oddity opens in theaters on July 19, 2024.
