2024 | rated R | starring Carolyn Bracken, Gwilyn Lee, Caroline Menton | written & directed by Damian McCarthy | 1h 38m | 4 1/2 out of 5 stars|
On a late night in Ireland, in a partially built house by herself, Dani Timmins (Carolyn Bracken) encounters a man with a glass eye at the front door who insists that he needs to come in because he saw someone else slip into the house when Dani wasn’t looking with the intent to kill her. Is he telling the truth? Flashforward, Dani is dead and her blind, psychic twin sister Darcy (also Bracken), owner of an oddity novelty shop, invites herself to the home of Dani’s widowed husband Ted (Gwilyn Lee, The Great) and the girlfriend he immediately bonded with (Caroline Menton) to find out what happened to her sister.
Damian McCarthy’s Oddity is a superb little cocktail of killers, jump scares and ghosts, but to call it a horror film would be too broad. It’s a supernatural mystery that unfolds like a good late-night, dark-and-stormy book, one reveal at a time. It’s refreshing in that Oddity was one of the few movies I saw this year where I felt like I was being told a story. In the effort to streamline genre films, most studio release genre films throw out the 2nd act and are built out of a high concept premise and its result. Cause and effect. That’s your average Blumehouse horror movie. What if the game Truth or Dare, was haunted? What if your childhood imaginary friend, was haunted? What if you backyard pool, was friggin haunted? That’s not a story, it just can feel like one with the right execution (what if you took a drug that made you young?) and usually it doesn’t even pull that off.
Instead, McCarthy is telling a story here. Oddity’s small cast and circumstance comes together out of disparate parts that by themselves don’t make for a compelling sit, but together fold into a thriller. A partially built house. A husband who works for a mental institute. A psychiatric patient with a glass eye. Our heroine, both blind and psychic, running a haunted novelty shop. Under a lesser writer and a tighter deadline, any one of these elements could have made its own thinly veiled and not as effective, but still functional movie. Something disposable you’d see on a Friday night and forget. But combined and we have something. I often relate this kind of lighting in a bottle writing style to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. Similarly, that movie is built on the planks of a few stories that by themselves don’t make a movie, but together form something rich, clever and wholly original. The philandering boss and the employee that wants to move up. The office romance. The girl-on-the-side who attempts suicide and the middle-man who has to deal with it. It’s the combination of these things that keep a script flourishing from draft to draft by interrogating what it’s doing, that make something wonderfully unique.
A seamless blend of horror styles, Oddity reveals how good it is one layer at a time. A disabled protagonist, a smarmy doctor widower and a mysterious figure outside a tent. It’s a mystery wrapped around the occult where the horror elements are grounded and the procedural elements elevated. It’s primarily a single-location thriller too. In which Darcy intrudes on the life of Ted and insists on spending the night with the new couple. She creeps them out, as does the chest she sent beforehand, a life-size wooden puppet that looks like a ghoul. Ted is living in a crime scene that he’s trying to brush past and Darcy searches the sight for anything that will trigger a vision to her sister’s final moments – and when we get that reveal it’s as chilling as any straight-up slasher movie.
This is one of those movies that is best gone into cold, to put the pieces of it together with our heroine. It’s not world-shattering, the solution is in retrospect, quite, simple – but it’s also the most devious and satisfying of the choices we’re given. It is my definition of great movie on its most basic level: a good story, well told. It is elegantly constructed, well written, well acted and executed with a genre craftsmanship. It’s one of those stories that, even after the killer reveal, is able to keep us guessing about what will happen next. Right up to the final frame. Oddity is so good that it makes you see flaws in otherwise very good movies. So far, it is not just my favorite horror movie of the year, but my favorite movie of the year.