Having recently acquired a rustic palatial estate in the Irish countryside, Dani (Carolyn Bracken) tends to interior renovations while husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) works at a nearby psychiatric hospital. One evening, Dani receives a knock on the door, and opens the speakeasy to reveal a man named Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy). Frantic, unkempt, and sporting a prosthetic eye, Olin asks to be let in right away. Not one to immediately let a stranger into her new home, Dani refuses, but then receives even more distressing information: Olin has seen someone else enter the house, and asserts she is neither safe nor alone behind the locked door. If he’s let in, he will check the house for her and leave if everything’s all clear. If not, she’ll be forced to face these unfamiliar grounds on her own. It’s a real “damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation” for Dani, and an enticing hook that director Damian Mc Carthy (Caveat) uses to open Oddity, his latest feature. A slow-burn tale of paranormal vengeance, the rest of the film is seldom as compelling as its opening sequence, and Mc Carthy’s storytelling instincts don’t always make for the most rousing watch, but he does have an undenoable way with atmosphere, and still manages to offer plenty of intriguing horror fodder to attract a diverse cross-section of the genre’s fans.
After presenting Dani with her corker of a Catch-22, Mc Carthy then jumps the story forward one year in time. Dani, sadly, did not survive that evening in the house, and law enforcement has just found the body of Olin, who turned out to be a former patient at Ted’s hospital. With the prime suspect deceased, Ted breaks the news to Dani’s blind twin sister, Darcy (also Bracken). A spiritual medium and proprietor of cursed objects, something about the news doesn’t sit well with Darcy, especially since Ted has already moved on to dating Yana (Caroline Menton), whom he knew a full year prior to Dani’s death. Looking to conduct her own investigation, Darcy shows up at Ted’s house on the anniversary of Dani’s death, accompanied by a trunk with a full-sized mannequin, which would only be slightly unsettling if the mannequin looked more like an actual store model and less like an ossified corpse of a human painfully frozen mid-scream.
Darcy’s mission marks the strongest element of Mc Carthy’s screenplay, but the director admittedly takes a while to get the ball rolling here, and once everything is in place, there’s still a wait-and-see nature to the proceedings that remains a bit unappealing. Obviously, things are not what they seem with the central mystery of Dani’s death, which was elided entirely with the time jump, and Lee plays Ted as too much of an unconscionable jerk, showing little in the way of empathy for his patients or loved ones and making for a rather uncomplicated character. Oddity does eventually turn into a haunted house chiller, with the aforementioned estate offering up a terrific location for spectral haunts. A formidable edifice of wood and stone characterized by a series of long, ominous hallways, shadowy corners, and opportunistic trapdoors, the estate is in fact the real star of the show, suggesting an endless number of terrifying possibilities. It’s regrettable, then, that Mc Carthy seems too unwilling to explore all of them in earnest, but regardless of such deficits, Oddity should still find a willing and generous audience on streaming services — it won the Audience Award at SXSW earlier this year — and viewers will be rewarded with the film’s evocative central location, dread-inducing atmosphere, and nightmarish, crowd-pleasing final shot.
DIRECTOR: Damian McCarthy; CAST: Gwilym Lee, Carolyn Bracken, Tadhg Murphy, Caroline Menton; DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films; IN THEATERS: July 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
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