Movie Review: Oddity

There are some stories that are best enjoyed by beginning them with as little knowledge as possible, where knowing even a little bit about what is to come can mar the initial experience to at least some degree. Writer / director Damian Mc Carthy’s Oddity is one example, and fortunately for me the only thing I knew going in was that it is a horror movie. Even then it isn’t perfect, but Mc Carthy is so skillful at building and maintaining suspense through disorientation, that a complete lack of foreknowledge feels necessary to fully enjoy it. As such, I’ll keep my description of the plot to a minimum, but you may still want to skip the next paragraph, and maybe even skip the entire review until after you’ve seen the movie.

Dani Odello-Timmis (Carolyn Bracken) is renovating the country house she recently purchased with her husband, psychiatrist Ted Timmis (Gwilym Lee), when she experiences an encounter with a frightening man (Tadhg Murphy) and is later found murdered. One year later, her twin sister Darcy (Bracken again) is visited in her curiosity shop by Ted, who presents her with a dark gift. The visit inspires her to travel out to the country house, where Ted is now living with his new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton), to use her psychic abilities to try and figure out what really happened to Dani.

The opening 20 minutes or so of Oddity jump from one eerie scene to another, quickly instilling feelings of both confusion and suspense, as the viewer tries to suss out how they are each connected. Dani’s encounter with a stranger while alone in the large and unusual house is one of the most brilliantly creepy scenes in recent memory, establishing a nearly unbearable level of suspense from the impossible choice presented to her.

The mystery surrounding Dani’s fate is what initially drives the movie forward, but as the plot begins to fall into place it becomes all too easy to figure out what happened, instead leaving us to wonder what the characters will do as they put things together. Using ghostly sightings and a frightening life-sized wooden doll, Mc Carthy pulls off several well-earned jump scares, and he and cinematographer Colm Hogan certainly know how to stage a scene for maximum eerie effect. But there is a dash of cheesiness that the movie can’t quite shake and which brings the overall quality down just a notch.

All in all, this is a strong sophomore outing from a very promising filmmaker that should keep viewers entertained and even inspire a nightmare or two. While there are some gory images of the aftereffects of violence, none of the acts occur on screen, which means even some of the more squeamish among us should be able to handle it. It’s a darkly fun ghost story that makes an excellent choice to watch cuddled under some blankets on a dark Autumn evening. ★★★★