Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Damian McCarthy
Starring: Carolyn Bracken, Gwilym Lee, Tadhg Murphy, Caroline Menton, Jonathan French, Steve
Wall
Over the last decade a crop of talented horror filmmakers has emerged
from Ireland, with the likes of Lee Cronin (The Hole in the Ground) and Kate Dolan (You Are Not My Mother) quickly snapped up by Hollywood to helm instalments of the Evil Dead and M3GAN franchises. On the basis of his 2021 debut, Caveat, I suspected writer/director Damian McCarthy might be
the most talented of this bunch, and his second film, Oddity, confirms my suspicions. In just two films, McCarthy has displayed more
creativity, ingenuity and originality than many genre filmmakers manage
across an entire filmography. As with Caveat, there are moments in Oddity that will have horror fans leaning forward and thinking "Well,
that's something I haven't seen before."
You'll be thinking this within a few minutes as McCarthy opens his film
with a novel and terrifying sequence that makes you wonder how it's never
been done before. Alone at night in her new and yet to be furnished home
in rural Ireland, Dani (Carolyn Bracken) hears a knock on the front
door. Opening its peephole she's greeted by the sight of a nervous,
lank-haired man (Tadhg Murphy) with one glass eye who goes by the
name of Olin (the character was previously the subject of McCarthy's 2103
short How Olin Lost his Eye). Olin reveals himself as a former inmate of the psychiatric institution
where Dani's husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) is employed as a doctor, and
he claims he witnessed a man enter Dani's house when she left the door
open as she went looking for her phone in her car. Dani finds herself in a
quandary. Does she stay in the house with one potential psycho or trust
Olin and let him in to look around? Bracken plays the part with a palpable
frustration as she tries to assess the situation, and we're given the
impression she doesn't want to be seen as prejudiced towards Olin while
also understandably apprehensive about his intentions. It's a
nerve-wracking opening that draws on the famous prologue of When a Stranger Calls while adding its own twist.
We don't learn what decision Dani took, but we do learn that it cost her
life. Olin is later found in a halfway house with his head smashed in. A
year later Ted pays a visit to Dani's blind sister D'Arcy (also played by
Bracken), who runs a curio shop filled with creepy oddities including the
mangy bunny toy from Caveat (McCarthy seems to be fashioning his own "Waniverse" within his
films). D'Arcy claims she has the psychic ability to tell what went
through a dead person's mind in their final moments, simply by touching
one of their personal possessions. She has requested Olin's glass eye,
hoping it will reveal what really happened to Dani that night. A man of
logic and science, Ted doesn't believe in such nonsense, but he presents
D'Arcy with the glass eye and reveals that he has a new girlfriend in the
form of Yana (Caroline Menton), a snooty sales rep he claims he met
in the aftermath of Dani's murder.
A week later Ted and Yana are surprised to receive a large locked wooden
trunk, and even more shocked when D'Arcy arrives at their door
unannounced. Having sent the trunk ahead of her arrival, D'Arcy reveals
its contains a full-sized wooden figure that resembles a cross between a
tobacconist's Indian and the medical mannequin from cult '80s
horror Pin. Ted has a shift at the madhouse that evening, leaving Yana alone with
D'Arcy, who begins to ask a lot of uncomfortable questions.
If Caveat played like a cross between Edgar Allan Poe and EC Comics, Oddity is a hybrid of a '70s Amicus chiller and Clive Barker's twisted
tales of suburban sociopaths. D'Arcy's curiosity shop, filled with items
she claims bring misfortune to anyone who might steal them, is clearly
influenced by Peter Cushing's antique store from the Amicus
anthology From Beyond the Grave. As was usually the case with the segments of Amicus's portmanteau
films, the action here plays out largely in a single location and is
centred around an eccentric figure, in this case D'Arcy. As with Amicus,
there's plenty of wry humour here, much of it generated via the abrasive
dynamic between D'Arcy and Yana, two women with very different
philosophies, one spiritual, one superficial.
In an era obsessed with "elevated horror" and explorations of
"trauma," Oddity is a refreshingly old-fashioned tale of awful people getting their
comeuppance via the supernatural in classic EC Comics fashion.
Like Caveat, McCarthy closes his latest with a shot that resembles the final splash
page of a 1950s horror comic, a devillish denouement that reminds us just
how much fun the horror genre can be when a filmmaker is more concerned
with scaring his viewers than lecturing them, and isn't afraid to risk
being dismissed as "silly" by more cynical viewers.
While McCarthy's films nod to clear influences (I can tell he spent his
childhood Friday nights watching the same horror movies on British TV as I
once did), they're filled with moments of gob-smacking originality. I
won't go into details, but there's a bit where Yana decides to take a
closer look at the wooden dummy that is like nothing I've seen before. As
a kid when I would watch horror movies with my mum, she would often
declare "Who comes up with these ideas?" It's not a question you find
yourself asking all that much of horror movies now, as even the best ones
rarely present you with something you haven't seen before. I'm not sure if
McCarthy is the best horror filmmaker working today, but nobody can touch
him when it comes to ideas.
Of course, a great idea isn't much good if you can't pull it off and
integrate it successfully into your narrative. That's not an issue for
McCarthy, who has proven himself a consummate horror storyteller. He knows
just the right amount of information to give his audience at any given
moment, keeping us guessing until it serves the story better to show us
what's behind the curtain. He has a commendable understanding of the
importance of establishing a setting, and like the remote cottage
of Caveat, the home here plays an integral part as characters move up and down its
two levels. McCarthy establishes its geography early on, which aids in
building tension later on as characters move through its halls and peer
over balconies. Details that seem initially innocuous are later revealed
to play a substantial role in the narrative. McCarthy's filmmaking is
meticulous and calculated, but never feels cold or sterile. He knows how
to get under your skin, and which buttons to press at the right time. If
Hollywood comes calling, as I suspect it will, I hope he can maintain his
distinct flavour.
Oddity is on Shudder now.
