The New Movie of the Week: Oddity

Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is alone in her house while her husband, Dr. Ted Timmis (Gwilym Lee), is at work at a nearby sanitarium when Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy) arrives at the house and wants to be let in because he saw someone enter the house while Dani was getting something out of her car.  Dani refuses with dire consequences and Olin is accused of the murder and later found murdered himself in his cell at the psychiatric hospital.  One year later, Ted visits Darcy (Carolyn Bracken again), Dani’s twin sister who is blind, but also clairvoyant with psychometric powers.  She can see things when she touches them.  Ted has brought her something that belonged to Olin and Darcy sees what really happened that night and plans how to deal with this new information in order to bring justice to her sister’s killer.

Oddity is a 2024 Irish film written and directed by Damian Mc Carthy.  The movie was filmed in West Cork Ireland at the same converted barn that was used in Mc Carthy’s first feature film Caveat.  Olin Boole is also a character from an earlier short film written and directed by Mc Carthy called How Olin Lost His Eye, giving the briefly seen character a back story.  The film won several audience awards at film festivals and was released on July 19, 2024 with a Video on Demand release on August 20, 2024.  It has received very good reviews from critics.  Rotten Tomatoes 96% of 101 reviews positive with a score of 7.6/10.  It is touted as “An elegant and spooky ghost story punctuated with clever jolts, Oddity hew to the fundamentals of fright and achieves shout-inducing results”.  It has also been called “unnerving and unsettling”.

I have not been a fan of too many modern horror films of late.  Too often either animals are included, which takes my focus away from the story as I worry the entire time about the life of the creature, or gore and blood are substituted for story and character complexity.  But Oddity is different.  There is little gore and the horror is created by ambiance and situation.  There are a combination of jump scares, one of which almost made me scream, and atmospheric creepiness that is both locational and created by the wonderful performance of Carolyn Bracken as both Dani and Darcy.  A big part of the ambiance is created by the wooden mannequin’s presence and what its actual purpose is.  Mc Carthy drew inspiration from Child’s Play and Creepshow and other movies where dolls come to life, thought it would be “…cool to have one that’s your size, that would be a force to reckon with if it did come alive”. The very presence of the life size wooden character adds tension to each scene it is in.  I very much enjoyed this film, it felt fresh and new without being bloody, gory or crass.  It had an elegance to it and a kind of psychological mystery to solve.  I have not seen Caveat Mc Carthy’s first feature length film, but now I want to.