If one has been watching a string of horror films that don’t quite get things right, “Oddity” plays like a revelation. A scary vibe – and indeed outright scares – emerge from characters and their motivations, unusual but plausible settings, and supernatural yet well-explained rules by which the movie must operate.
This Shudder production is under the radar because it’s an Irish film from writer-director Damian Mc Carthy, who has only one other full-length credit, 2020’s “Caveat.” You probably haven’t heard of any of the actors, but they are outstanding.
Carolyn Bracken plays Dani, who is overseeing the modernizing interior construction of an old brick building that’s square shaped with a large interior courtyard. Before it’s hooked up to heat and electricity, she’s spending nights in a tent in the foyer.
“Oddity” (2024)
Director: Damian Mc Carthy
Writer: Damian Mc Carthy
Stars: Carolyn Bracken, Johnny French, Steve Wall
Her husband, Declan (Johnny French), is busy with his night post in the city as a psychiatric-ward doctor, but things are looking up; he might soon get switched to regular hours.
The cold open is a masterful horror short. One night, a stranger (Tadhg Murphy) knocks on the door, warning Dani that someone snuck into the manor while she was fetching something from her car. The theme of “To trust or not to trust?” is like “Knock at the Cabin” but compressed into a gripping one-scene drama.
Uninvited guest
What’s brilliant about “Oddity” going forward is it doesn’t rely on a duality of “Here’s who’s good; here’s who is evil – now enjoy the scares as they play out.” Rather, everyone is a complex person. We might be inclined to trust some and mistrust others, but – like in real life – our judgement might be imperfect.
The one supernatural factor comes from Bracken when she plays her second character, almost unrecognizable from the first: Dani’s blind twin Darcy, a good witch. She’s learning her craft, not a master yet.
Dani and Declan humor Darcy with unease, especially when she brings a wooden golem to the house on a visit and props him up like he’s a dinner guest. Mc Carthy wrings every bit of creepiness out of this corpse-like figure. It can be something as simple as someone looking over the railing of the second-floor hallway and seeing the golem staring up.
The cinematography and score help construct the creepy mood at the architecturally fascinating country manor, but I must give special mention to the sound mixing/editing, which would challenge for an Oscar if the horror genre wasn’t ignored.
The technicians play the volume like they’re directing a symphony. Their tools include ambient horns, but also creaks that might or might not be an uninvited guest sneaking around. Sometimes Dani (or whoever is in the place alone) hears it, sometimes only the viewer does. We feel helpless but also intimate with their situation.
Constructing scares
The jump-scares – and there’s one where I literally flinched – are earned because the setup is fair. It doesn’t require that the villain be supernaturally stealthy (although in the case of the golem, it is), because we heard the creaks ourself.
And a scripted scare-construction trick comes when characters look at the pictures in a motion-sensitive digital camera, thus gleaning shocking information.
The biggest oddity of “Oddity,” compared to a lot of modern horror, is that the story is a foundation rather than an afterthought. Amid the great performances (also of note are Steve Wall as a cruel psych-hall warden and Caroline Menton as a self-centered pharma rep) and the evocative manor, the film includes a whodunit.
Mc Carthy allows us to mull various characters in the front of our brain even as we soak up the vibe with the back. The solution makes sense and creates the extra pleasure of making us rethink previous scenes. Even the “one last scare” is earned, as a bellhop’s bell leads to more suspense than the spinning top at the end of “Inception.”
Watch enough mediocre horror and you can start to think the genre is about frivolous tension-releasing laughs that play on our shallowest emotions. “Oddity” reminds us the waters can run deeper without sacrificing the fun.