Damian Mc Carthy excels at the uncanny. The Irish director’s style is elegant, with handsome cinematography and controlled editing. Those qualities aren’t rare in horror films, but the spine-tingling effect of his movies is. At its most powerful, Mc Carthy’s work feels like looking into a mirror and seeing another face reflected back at you. His sophomore feature Oddity is full of such moments — not to mention the scariest cold open of the year so far.
The first 11 minutes of this movie are a masterpiece of tension, opening in a centuries-old Irish country house where Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is settling in for the night. She and her husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) are renovating the primitive stone structure, and Dani has pitched a tent in what will someday be their living room. She’s vulnerable – the house has no electricity, no heat, and minimal cell-phone signal – and when a stranger knocks on her door, it kicks off a breathless sequence that uses shadows and empty space to create monsters in the viewer’s mind. Later on, this approach will produce a truly unusual and exotic specimen: The well-earned jump scare.
Oddity contains a handful of exceptional nail-biting suspense scenes, but most of the film is made up of a different type of horror story: A good old-fashioned EC Comics-style morality tale. You see, after Dani’s sudden, violent death in that opening sequence, Ted – a doctor at the same hospital from which Dani’s killer supposedly escaped – finished fixing up the house. He then moved his coworker/girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton) into the space, and carried on like nothing happened. Ted and Yana are arrogant, unpleasant people, always sniping at each other and sneering at those they consider their lessers. They probably deserve each other. But that’s not enough for Dani’s twin sister Darcy, who’s played by Bracken in a short blonde bob that makes her look like Gwendoline Christie from afar.
Having a dead ringer for a dead woman enter the picture is an unsettling touch. (It certainly seems to bother Yana.) And Oddity’s remaining mysteries largely revolve around Darcy: She’s blind, but very aware of her surroundings, which catches people off guard. She also owns an antique store she claims is full of cursed objects, a humorous way of deterring shoplifters that becomes less of a joke as the story unfolds. Darcy is more than she seems on many levels. But the extent of her power isn’t obvious until later, when Oddity kicks into supernatural high gear after a lull in the second act.
Unfortunately, the reveal of what really happened to Dani is less surprising, and is telegraphed from the moment Darcy shows up at Ted and Yana’s place unannounced. Ted is too polite to kick Darcy out, but too selfish to entertain her himself, and so he leaves Yana alone with her boyfriend’s dead wife’s sister and an unusual housewarming present: A human-sized “witch doll” carved out of wood with a horrible expression and holes drilled into the back of its head. Darcy has inserted bizarre objects – a vial of blood, a rolled-up photo of the twins as little girls – into each of the holes. And while she refuses to explain what they’re for, she becomes enraged when Yana touches them. Her normally placid voice becomes ragged: “Put them back!,” she commands Yana, startling her – and us.
The supernatural blends with mundane motivations like lust and revenge in Oddity’s second half, and there are long stretches where nothing occult happens at all. At times, the storytelling and style are at odds with one another, as the blunt mechanics of punishing the wicked clash with the esoteric methods of that punishment. But the uneasy tone remains consistent, particularly when the otherwise restrained filmmaking explodes in flashes of bloody violence backed by Richard G. Mitchell’s spooky-ooky score. The elements may fit together awkwardly, but they leave an overwhelming impression, like a nightmare that haunts the dreamer for days after it ends.
