Review: Oddity

Director:  Damien Mc Carthy

Stars:  Carolyn Bracken, Tadhg Murphy, Gwilym Lee

Oddity‘s cold open offers us a delicious little conundrum. A stranger knocks at your door. Through the peep hole he looks like a rather worrisome fellow. But the stranger is agitated, claiming that he’s seen an intruder sneak into your house. He beseeches you to let him in. Now what do you do? Trust this unknown person, or risk him becoming the intruder?

Irish writer-director Damien Mc Carthy follows up his promising Caveat with another venture into the macabre, adding to a growing number of strong, imaginative Irish horror stories to have arrived in recent months and years (Paul Duane’s All You Need is Death ought to be on your radar). Here Darcy Odello (Carolyn Bracken) – blind storekeep of a quaint/cursed curiosity shop – attempts to learn more about the violent death of her twin sister Dani, believed murdered by escaped psychiatric patient Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy). Open to matters of the occult, she’s not beyond a ritual séance to get her started, but the visions she receives are startling, and they lead her back to her sister’s inconvenienced widower Ted (Gwilyn Lee), who leaves her at his home with his new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton). But Darcy’s arrival is preceded by her unusual luggage; a wooden trunk with a rather unique… inhabitant.

Oddity operates at a particular pace, a perhaps over-familiar slow-burn that means the brief synopsis above covers the entire first third of the running time. Mc Carthy is adept at the brooding disquiet that just about keeps the motor running, but the tendency toward such self-seriousness in low-budget horror at the moment risks folding this tale in with so many others out there. The ensuing hour unfolds as a long, quiet dark night of the soul, peppered with miniature – but mostly effective – jump scares, as what happened to Dani is filled in piecemeal.

While performances across the board are muted but committed, the overall stifling tone and inching momentum grow a little frustrating. It feels as though Mc Carthy is back-pocketing a lot of the story’s better turns, leaving us chugging through sombre material that moves at a limp. The revelations, when they come, are hardly revelatory, making the sense of occasion feel like something of an empty promise.

Thankfully, then, Oddity ultimately – and effectively – turns into the monster movie it consistently threatens to become, quite openly influenced by the myth of the golem. It’s efforts in this regard amount to only a small portion of its running time, but the effect is expertly managed, reframing the success of the whole. That, coupled with Mc Carthy’s superior writing and knack for an (underutilised) dark wit, mean that Oddity succeeds, sometimes in spite of itself. It’s a handsome picture, and a progression from it’s predecessor. The strong word of mouth makes a degree of sense. But this sense of the perpetually dour and severe (as much in the Eraserhead-esque ambient sound design as anywhere else) threatens to suck any sense of interest or involvement from its more ponderous passages.