Damian McCarthy’s supernatural sophomore feature rewards a nail-biting atmosphere with satisfying if uneven execution
One year after the death of her sister Dani (Carolyn Bracken) by an escaped asylum patient, blind medium Darcy (also Bracken) returns to the site of her murder–an Irish countryside mansion Dani was in the middle of renovating…and where her widowed husband and asylum warden Ted (Gwilym Lee) still lives with his new partner, Yana (Caroline Menton). Darcy’s unexpected arrival is an awkward surprise for Ted and Yana, exacerbated by her insistence on staying the night as a form of closure. Darcy, the owner of a “cursed objects” oddities shop in the city, also brings a present–a terrifying wooden sculpture of a screaming man–that she believes will help her uncover the truth behind Dani’s murder. Ted spirits off to a night shift at the asylum, with Yana following behind for a weekend in the city…until a pair of missing car keys effectively traps Yana with her husband’s creepy, sleuthing ex-sister-in-law.
With its locked-room mystery effectively in motion after a chilling opening and efficient setup, Damian McCarthy’s Oddity deliciously takes its time ratcheting up the tension. Hitchcock once said that all that was necessary to create suspense was to show a ticking bomb underneath a table during an innocuous conversation. Frozen with rage, Darcy’s demonic wooden centerpiece acts as a chilling promise of Oddity‘s horrors to come. Along the way, McCarthy fiendishly infuses Hitchcock’s maxim with ghostly flair, as he utilizes Brian Philip Davis’ judicious editing and Aza Hand’s unpredictable sound design to tease offscreen spirits and invade his atmosphere with faint yet piercing bumps in the night. Dread is built up to nail-biting degrees as the audience becomes just as trapped as the hapless Yana in a situation that incrementally shifts from awkward to terrifying.
It’s an astonishingly fun evolution of McCarthy’s practical ambitions, first on display in his debut feature Caveat; where his reach exceeded the low-budget grasp of that film’s ultimately disappointing execution, the same restrictions work wonders in Oddity’s claustrophobic countryside setting. The relentlessness of Oddity’s pacing makes the mansion’s cavernous interior feel paradoxically inescapable, with new frights capable of appearing in any encroaching dark corner. Bringing back Hitchcock, much of Oddity feels reminiscent of a paranormally-charged adaptation of Dial M for Murder–a near-single-location chamber play now brimming with supernatural scares and wry reveals that reward the audience’s cultivated patience. Much like Oddity’s spare yet impactful jump scares, brief cutaways to Ted’s curious interactions with an asylum orderly (Steve Wall) provide much-needed opportunities to burn off the carefully built tension until the mechanics of McCarthy’s screenplay collect these diverse elements into a banger of a finale. While mileage may vary as to the successful execution of these various twists and turns, it’s clear that McCarthy has honed a watchful eye on how to evoke and release tension where it’s desperately needed.
The withdrawn performances by McCarthy’s mainly three-hander cast (minus its mannequin) play well into Oddity’s intricately managed suspense, as some characters’ reluctant politeness and diverging beliefs in the beyond eventually come to blows with primal satisfaction. While Menton’s Yana is at first grating in her hostility towards Darcy’s familiar yet alien presence in her home, her gradual caving-in to Oddity’s various scares becomes quite satisfying to witness. Bracken excels in her dual role as victim Dani and investigator Darcy; in addition to playing both roles, she conceals some exciting reveals in her latter role that lend Oddity some of its most satisfying payoffs. Less impactful, though, is Lee’s Ted. While Ted is mainly the stiff-upper-lip skeptic when it comes to the paranormal, Lee and McCarthy’s insistence on playing each of his moments as an obstinate stick in the mud robs Ted of what fleeting chemistry he has with Yana during their limited screen time, as well as whatever ambiguities his character deserves to have as Oddity’s reveals take shape. However, the spectrum of belief created by these three characters grants Oddity an unexpected strength.
While McCarthy’s sophomore feature is first and foremost a horror film, the cast’s performances give Oddity an intriguingly chameleonic tone, allowing the audience room to constantly question just what genre the film might truly belong to.
Oddity is now playing in theaters courtesy of IFC Films and Shudder.
