James Y. Lee
Sometimes simple packages deliver the best experiences. In a continuing wave of horror films and discourse saturated by the since-disowned “elevated” moniker—among which perhaps the over-marketed Longlegs could sit as its most recent inheritor—there’s some deep satisfaction to be found in films that prioritize delivering gnarly, thrilling scares with cohesively tight formality. Fresh off the heels of films like the Philippous’ Talk to Me and Zach Cregger’s Barbarian comes Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy with Oddity—a folk horror tale with a near-perfect control of tension, atmosphere, and tone that brings a profoundly unsettling wooden mannequin and some of the most sadistically deployed jumpscares of recent memory to boot. It certainly helps the film’s case that it’s also a cleverly spun tale even as it treads decently familiar ground. Oddity is a case study of how honing in on the best traits of well-trodden tropes can still be rather effective, making for a horror-packed experience that’s as nerve-shredding as it is deeply entertaining.
Oddity hits the ground running from its initial moments, following up a Shining-esque drone shot of the mountainside with a dilemma packed with suspense even before the titles emerge. Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is in the process of renovating a large country house with her husband, Ted (Gwilym Lee), a doctor working at a nearby mental health institution who’s working the night shift one day, leaving her alone at the premises for the evening. As night encroaches in Oddity, the door knocks—it’s a man named Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy), a patient from the institution with a visibly white-irised glass eye, who warns her that something just snuck into her house while she wasn’t looking, and says that he wants to be let in so that he can look for it, wherever it might be. McCarthy decisively cuts away before we see Dani’s crucial choice to let Olin in or keep him out, but the outcome is made clear moments later. Dani is brutally murdered that same night, and Olin, accused of killing Dani, is found in the institution almost a year later with his head crushed to pulp where the iris of his glass eye the only intact thing remaining of it.
That iris is delivered by Ted later on to Dani’s sister, Darcy (also played by Bracken)—a blind psychic who keeps a collection of cursed items and is able to tap into visions of personal belongings’ pasts based on the deep connection they had with their owners. Driven by grief and a desire to see what Olin saw on the night of Dani’s death, Darcy uses Olin’s iris to do so, but the full truth is clearly not what she expected. Ted, now in a new relationship with a colleague named Yana (Caroline Menton), soon receives a massive trunk from Darcy before she herself turns up at their doorstep, revealing that the trunk contains a large wooden mannequin that Darcy and Dani’s mother once seemingly received from a witch. The mannequin itself in Oddity is deeply grotesque in appearance and is one of the film’s most consistent highlights of both production design and tension. Its mouth is always agape, as if about to snap down on an unsuspecting appendage, and its bulky form resembles a flayed cadaver encased in wood. As Yana and Ted soon discover, whatever energy is attached to Darcy’s unsettling delivery is only amplifying various strange goings-on in the house, among them erstwhile-fleeting visions of Dani that are growing increasingly malevolent.
From here on out, Oddity ratchets up the scares even further, hinging on the clever ways it manages to amplify the well-trodden. On a personal note, there’s something really special to be said about a film that utilizes jumpscares in a way that genuinely jolts me into attention. Long have audiences slogged through Conjuring-type fare, laden with convenient surprises, and ghouls bound by nothing but their own whims leaping at the camera whose flight paths you can see coming from miles and minutes away. On the contrary, McCarthy seems to have a keen awareness of tools within certain settings that can prove to be violently unsettling when used to maximal effect in Oddity. Dani’s camera proves useful not just as a carrier of frightening evidence, but also a means of flash-shuttering into view the horrors lurking in the dark. Darcy’s wooden mannequin seems immobile outside of instances where its head turns to gaze at characters. The dread of Oddity‘s many encroaching threats expertly escalates the more the camera deliberately gazes at dark, wide-open spaces; among many other yelp-worthy surprises I’m not about to spoil. Taken as a whole, Oddity‘s scares and their wild effectiveness serves as a sign of a film whose confidence in atmosphere and tone permits it to go buck-wild on stretching out suspense both to its absolute limit and whenever the occasion permits.
The simplicity of its script certainly helps matters. Without a lot of extraneous distractions, much of the film’s narrative focus hinges solely on its three protagonists, grounding itself mostly within the confines of Ted and Yana’s house, as well as the institution that Ted works in. It also helps for twists and turns in Oddity to be that much more effective, as the substance they add naturally gets streamlined within the film’s existing narrative constraints. As the truth behind Dani’s murder becomes more complex—only further supported by editing that hinges on retroactive revelation adding so much substance to what’s already being presented—hardly a single character here ever stays truly what they present themselves as. The cast pulls off that multitudinousness with great efficiency. Special mention, of course, has to go to Bracken, who manages to differentiate Dani and Darcy even beyond their obvious differences in hair color and sight by playing up the former’s brighter energy and the latter’s more haunted solemnity.
With those shifts in character also come shifts in the narrative direction of Oddity—from investigation to something more vengeful and from helplessness to something more cathartic—all of which culminate in a deeply satisfying experience by the end, even as the dread and atmosphere remains consistent. It’s just that much of a shame that a closer look into the narrative specifics of Oddity‘s hauntings leads to some holes and losses in potential. A few elements of what lingers after Dani’s death are glossed over after only a couple scenes and established with very few rules, which only makes it that much more unusual when placed next to the others that are more cohesively placed, and have enough details and foreshadowing backing them up to make even Chekhov blush.
Oddity‘s understanding of what makes this kind of suspense-stretching horror stick is rudimentary. Whatever lies on the other side of that massive jumpscare is not relief that the jolt of the threat is over, but further skin-crawling dread that something even worse is about to happen. That’s how McCarthy, his cast, and the crew, manage to sustain a pulse-pounding amount of dread for a film that’s just over 90 minutes, each scare only amplifying the effect of the last and each one continually reinforcing that the shadows looming large over this house and this family are not ones that fade so easily. The wooden mannequin at the center of it all could very well serve as the film’s perfect symbol, even outside of the fact that it’s easily its most prominent. It’s always sitting there at the dining table, always with its mouth hanging agape, always with its arms slightly outstretched on the table… but it’ll also steal glances your way when you’re not looking. From that moment onward, you know that if it were to choose to do anything more, something horrible is almost certainly headed your way.
