This will likely be a short review, partly I don’t really have any deep thoughts I need to unpack with regard to Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy’s second feature film to date, and partly because it is very much the kind of movie whose structure makes it difficult to get too deep into discussion of plot detail without straying into spoiler territory.
But, I do at least want to record the fact that I watched it, and really liked it, in the hope this recommendation might inspire a loyal reader or two to check it out - possibly even in time for Halloween next week, as this one definitely makes a good fit for the season.
So - our setting is contemporary Ireland, where Ted (Gwilym Lee) and his wife Dani (Carolyn Bracken) are in the process of renovating a remote stone farmhouse. Ted is a doctor who works the night shift at a nearby psychiatric hospital, leaving Dani alone overnight.
Subsequent to a suitably baleful and unnerving opening sequence establishing this situation, it becomes clear that Dani has in fact been murdered, seemingly by patient recently released from Ted’s hospital, who intruded into the house during the night, and who in turn has subsequently been found dead in grotesque and inexplicable circumstances.
Jumping forward exactly one year in the timeline, Dani’s twin sister Darcy (also played by Bracken) re-enters the life of Ted, who is living in the now completed farmhouse with his new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton), seemingly determined to obtain some kind of closure and/or clarity vis-a-vis her sister’s death.
It is with the introduction of the Darcy character that the tone of the film shifts from a sharp, cynical brand of 21st century realism incorporating all the usual accoutrements of contemporary horror (smartphones, jump scares, dissociative editing, drone shots, rumbling sound design, softly spoken yet totally self-centred characters), and, admirably, instead begins to embrace what I can only describe as a mammoth dose of dusty, old-fashioned creepitude.
Darcy, you see, is a blind woman with keenly attuned psychic abilities, who runs a fantastical antique shop specialising in the sale of ‘cursed objects’ - each of them precisely calibrated via Darcy’s paranormal abilities to ensure that, whilst legitimate purchasers may sleep easy, shoplifters taking advantage of the sightless proprietor will have a very bad time indeed.
Which, needless to say, does not bode well for the substantial locked trunk which Darcy arranges to be delivered to Ted and Yana’s farmhouse, in advance of her own surprise arrival…
…and, if you think that this sounds like a conceit which an early 20th century ghost story anthologist might have rejected for being a bit too whimsical and on-the-nose, well… suffice to say that it ultimately feels as if the contents of several entire Pan Books of Horror Stories have been put through a blender to create the script for ‘Oddity’. In the best possible way, I hasten to add.
Or, perhaps it is instead more helpful to instead suggest that things play out rather like one of those projects in which all of the episodes in an Amicus-style portmanteau movie have been sewn together into a single story - but done with such care that, in this case, you can barely even see the joins.
Picking the film apart post-viewing, I can identify at least six or seven different horror tropes / story set ups woven together here - I won’t list them all, because, again, spoilers - but somehow, they are all successfully combined into a simple, minimal narrative featuring just six inter-connected characters and two locations.
The result, essentially, in an agreeably pulpy kind of supernatural riff on a ‘Les Diaboliques’-model thriller, which, in defiance of all storytelling logic, all hangs together just beautifully.
The unusual mixture of real world verisimilitude and atmospheric, occult-tinged fantasy is finely balanced here too, with the more outré elements of the story taking on an eerie, surrealistic power which they would likely not have achieved had the whole thing been framed as a Burton-esque retro gothic horror type palaver (which, thank the dark gods, it is not).
The scary bits are properly scary, the whimsical/creepy bits are whimsical and creepy… and I’d even go so far as to say that the funny bits are funny, although they’re a long time coming, admittedly.
And… that’s about all I have to say on the matter really.
A great little movie, well worth making time for, and a great choice for Halloween-adjacent viewing, I reckon.
So, if you find yourself ploughing trough the fallow fields of whatever streaming services you’re signed up to later this week after the trick or treaters have gone to bed - take a chance on ‘Oddity’, and I’ll wager a very small amount of money you won’t regret it.
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