By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Carolyn Bracken, Gwilym Lee and Caroline Menton
Written and directed by Damian McCarthy
IFC Films/Shudder
ODDITY opens with a sequence that plays like a great, creepy urban legend/campfire tale: A woman, Dani Timmis (Carolyn Bracken), is alone in a big, remote house in the middle of the night. Suddenly a stranger with one good eye is banging on her door, insisting that he saw someone sneak into her home while she wasn’t looking, begging to be let in to help her. Does she believe him and open the door, or quite understandably see him as the actual threat and leave him outside? We don’t witness the upshot of this quandary right away, but it fuels the entirety of the accomplished and creepy second feature from Irish writer/director Damian McCarthy.
Having made his debut with 2020’s very low-budget but well-received CAVEAT, McCarthy here delivers a more polished yet still quite constrained feature, with only two significant locations: that mansion and an oddities store in nearby Cork. It is run by Darcy Ordello (also Bracken), who is blind and Dani’s twin sister, though she styles herself or has been styled very differently, with a more severe bleach-blonde haircut. The excellent Bracken makes the siblings distinctive through her performances as well, and plays sightless with a complete lack of both gimmickry and sentimentality. Instead, it’s all in the small gestures, as when Darcy just slightly adjusts her stance while meeting a new person.
Darcy may not have traditional vision, but she does possess a gift similar to Johnny Smith’s in THE DEAD ZONE: She can glean a lot about a person and their history just by touching an object associated with them. Thus she usually wears gloves in her everyday life, but the gloves come off, so to speak, when it comes to solving the mystery of Dani’s murder. Everyone in the area is convinced the culprit was Olin Boole (Tadgh Murphy), that late-night visitor, since Dani was found brutally slain after he stopped by. Darcy isn’t convinced, and arrives at the estate with some occult totems in tow, to the vexation of Dani’s husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) and his new girlfriend/co-worker Yana (Caroline Menton). A psychiatric doctor by trade who works at the very facility where Boole was an inmate, Ted has no time for Darcy’s supernatural suspicions, insisting, “My dead wife is not haunting this house.” For her part, Darcy isn’t thrilled that Ted apparently didn’t even wait for the sheets to get cold, and after he leaves for work and circumstances strand Yana in the mansion with Darcy, things get tense in a few different ways.
One of the fun/scary things about ODDITY is the way McCarthy blends a few different kinds of horror–dealing with ghosts, psychic abilities and basic human evil–and keeps you guessing about which will come to the forefront as he unfolds his tale. He and cinematographer Colm Hogan deliver great atmosphere, shooting on the marvelous stonework-and-wood mansion interiors created by production designer Lauren Kelly and her team. At the same time as he’s keeping us on edge with the mood, amplified by Richard G. Mitchell’s jittery score and Aza Hand’s screams-and-creaking-wood sound design, McCarthy can also stage a hell of a jump-scare. One of the year’s very best jolts occurs during one of the several flashbacks as Darcy begins to tease out the truth of what happened that fateful night.
And then there’s the Wooden Man, a long-ago gift from Darcy’s deceased mother (who also bequeathed her the store) that Darcy brings with her. It’s not altogether clear how she intends to employ this statue to get to the truth, but it sure succeeds in adding to the uneasy mood. Carved with an eternally screaming mouth, it spends quite a bit of time sitting at a table, not moving, sometimes off in the background, all the time keeping us nervous because we know the damn thing is going to start moving at some point. No fair saying whether or not that actually happens, though one of its most unnerving moments has to do with what someone discovers inside the motionless sculpture.
ODDITY works as both a good and frightening horror film and an intriguing mystery, the latter a particular achievement given the limited number of characters. McCarthy’s expert narrative timing in unveiling the truths behind Dani’s death is matched by his strong casting and guidance of his limited ensemble; even during the stretches where nothing overtly scary is going on, we still feel the suspense simmering under the characters’ interactions. Well-timed moments of black humor leaven the mood here and there, though they never undercut the fear factor–and the perfectly judged final shot will have you departing the movie smiling and shivering in equal measure.
