REVIEW: Oddity [2024]

Rating: R | Runtime: 98 minutes
Release Date: July 19th, 2024 (USA) / August 30th, 2024 (Ireland)
Studio: IFC Films
Director(s): Damian Mc Carthy
Writer(s): Damian Mc Carthy

There is someone in there with you.

The cut to black/title screen at the start of Damian McCarthy’s Oddity is perfectly placed both as a means to create suspense and instill confusion. We have invested in Dani’s (Carolyn Bracken) plight—alone in an unfurnished house without cell reception as a strange man (Tadhg Murphy’s Olin Boole) begs her to let him in because he says he saw someone else enter when she wasn’t looking—and want to know what happens after she puts her hand on the lock. To then suddenly be whisked away to watch a different murder is jarring. Are they connected? How?

McCarthy boldly decides to believe his audience will gain its footing despite so many seemingly disparate things occurring all at once without context or, in many cases, closure. Dani opening or not opening the door. A mean looking orderly (Steve Wall’s Ivan) chastising a mental patient hours before he hears a brutal death in the next room. And then Dr. Ted Timmis (Gwilym Lee), Dani’s husband, entering an occult shop operated by someone who looks just like his wife? I initially thought I was watching parallel universes until the latter woman is given a name. Dani has a twin sister named Darcy (also Bracken).

Things finally start to fit together as McCarthy helps stabilize us with dialogue that’s meticulously written to set time and place while also revealing the film’s central truth, even if he doesn’t yet show how or why: Dani is dead. Did she open the door for Boole to kill her? Was there actually someone in the house like he explained? These are the questions Darcy has been asking for a full year—questions Ted believes have already been answered via the ensuing investigation. When he leaves her shop and Darcy walks to a mysterious wooden trunk in the corner, however, we realize she won’t stop until she’s certain.

Oddity is by no means a perfect film, but it’s a major step up from the artist’s previous Caveat. All the open-ended segues force McCarthy into creating a conduit with which to dump the exposition necessary for everything to make sense. It renders Ted’s new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton) crucial to the proceedings even as she feels shoehorned in and unworthy of our attention beyond her role as our stand-in. She becomes the person to whom Darcy tells everything as well as a target for the scares still to come (because Darcy is blind and thus unable to experience what we’re seeing). Add a creepy wooden mannequin and you cannot begin to fathom the twists and turns waiting in the wings.

How McCarthy exposes his truths is more effective than the plausibility and narrative soundness of them, but I’d rather that than the other way around. I can suspend my disbelief if the tension and visual panache gets me on the edge of my seat. That’s part of the reason we watch horror—to get caught up in the mood and potential of the unknown. So, while McCarthy does have to make some characters jump through hoops to hit their mark for the story’s next fright, the process never lulls. And all those “remember this?” payoffs actually feel smart rather than convenient thanks to a willingness to let the unbelievable play out believably.