ODDITY - Mark Reviews Movies

Oddity, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 18, 2024

Writer/director Damian McCarthy's Oddity possesses the quality of a ghost story, such as one that might be heard around a campfire or while spending the night in a creepy place like the estate in this film. McCarthy's tale seems cobbled together from several such stories—one about a late-night visitor, another about sneaky home-invader hiding who-knows-where in the house, yet another about the spirit of the victim of an unsolved murder, and more that pop up here in the background as set decoration or to become an unexpected key to the plot. Everything does have its place here, though, because the filmmaker creates and maintains a mysterious atmosphere in which anything—no matter how unlikely—seems possible.

The main story takes place a year after the brutal murder of a woman in a country manor she and her husband had purchased and started renovating. The widower is Dr. Ted Timmis (Gwilym Lee), a psychiatrist serving as the head of a psychiatric hospital in the city, and he's still living in that house, continuing on with his work, and now dating Yana (Caroline Menton), a pharmaceutical representative who helped him cope after his wife's murder.

Another central character here is Darcy (Carolyn Bracken), the victim's twin sister. She's the sort who might tell a spooky tale like one of those this film brings to made, and if we're to believe her abilities, those stories would have the ring of truth behind them. After all, she runs a shop dedicated to antiques and curiosities, announcing to incoming customers that any shoplifters should beware. Everything in the store is cursed, although any curse, Darcy claims, is lifted upon purchase (Now that's a bargain).

Darcy is blind and supposedly psychic, capable of seeing past events by way of reading objects. Ted visits his sister-in-law near the one-year anniversary of his wife's death to check in on Darcy, who survived brain cancer, and to offer her an item of most interest to her. It's the glass eye of the man who was found responsible for the sister's murder and who recently was killed himself in Ted's psychiatric facility, where the killer, who experienced a lifetime of mental health issues, was being held.

Darcy hopes it will bring some closure—an assurance, by way of her psychic abilities, that this was indeed her sister's killer. Ted, a man of science, is skeptical of Darcy's self-professed powers and the supernatural in general, especially when it comes to an allegedly haunted call bell that Darcy claims summons the ghost of a bellhop that was killed by a drunken hotel guest.

The sister's murder is a big question hanging over a lengthy portion of the film, because McCarthy opens his tale with a real corker of a prologue. It follows Dani (also Bracken), the wife and sister, on what seems to be an ordinary day of working on renovations to the estate. After finding the one spot in the house that gets a cellphone signal, she calls Ted and informs him that she plans to stay the night there alone.

The scene that follows is almost too cleverly suspenseful to reveal, after Dani runs out to car to grab something, returns inside, and hears a loud knocking at the front door. McCarthy shows himself to be a devotee of the philosophy that there's no image more terrifying than that of a closed door, although he makes a good argument here that the view of a space with a corner that one can't see around is right up there with it.

This sequence, which is given some time to breathe and to establish the story's central mystery of Dani's murder, uses both of those views—of Dani looking at the door, where a man is pleading to be let inside the house, and of her later staring at the stairwell, where she suspects someone might be lurking just around the corner. That both the other side of the door and the interior of the house could be equal threats is a practical conundrum of genuine, unsettling tension. McCarthy's smart enough as a storyteller, not necessarily to come up with the idea (which sounds very much like something from an old urban legend), but to milk the scenario with such skill that the suspense of the scene carries through until it's resolved.

That comes later, though, after McCarthy drops some additional clues as to how to figure out what happened to Dani and sets up yet another crafty scenario. It has Darcy arriving at Ted's house on the anniversary of Dani's death with a peculiar gift for him and the new girlfriend. What's inside the crate won't be revealed here, lest anyone try to piece together too much information too early, but it is oddly imposing and quite frightening, particularly after Ted leaves Darcy and Yana alone together with it in the house.

The rest of the plot is basically a murder mystery, with the frequency and apparent certainty of some kind of supernatural influence increasing as it progresses. What's compelling about this concoction of urban legend, ancient myth, and the darker impulses of the human mind is how precise McCarthy is in revealing hints, setting up seemingly little details—like a camera on a timer—for genuinely scary payoffs, and toying with both time and perspective to preserve suspense and create surprise—such as how we learn someone had been doing something in the middle of a conversation, unnoticed by the other participant. Oddity is a nifty and scary showcase of horror storytelling.

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