Oddity opens with such a simple, effective jolt of horror-movie craftsmanship that it threatens to undermine everything that comes later, even the creepy doll. Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is working on a fixer-upper house, alone, in the evening, and goes to retrieve something from her car. After returning inside, an intense man named Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy) who may have a false eye appears at her door and entreats her to come outside, because someone else entered her home while she popped out. Is he telling the truth? Is he a patient of Dani’s husband, Dr. Ted Timmis (Gwilym Lee), fixating on her? How can she heed his warning in either direction without exposing herself to further danger? That he responds so enthusiastically when she threatens to call the police is probably a point in his favor, though also not a reassuring one for Dani.
That’s the movie’s first 10 minutes and change, before the title card appears. Oddity doesn’t return to that scene right away, leaving us to imagine that it did not go well for Dani. Nearly a year later, Ted is dutifully visiting Dani’s twin sister Darcy (also Bracken), a blind woman who runs an antique store that appears to specialize in cursed objects. It’s here that Ted reveals he has been dating Yana (Caroline Menton), who he’s met at work; this may also be around the point where Oddity loses the graceful, horrifying, go-anywhere immediacy of what seems, however briefly, to be its premise. When Dani drops by Ted and Yana’s place unexpectedly, bringing along an unconventional and unwieldy gift, the movie threatens to become an archly mordant comedy of manners, with a life-sized doll serving as a particularly unwelcome presence. There’s nothing wrong with this tone, exactly, but it feels like the movie is toying with its characters, more listless than cruel, with a firm control and deliberate pace that starts to feel oppressive.
Eventually the movie circles back to Dani, Olin and the reason for Darcy’s visit. Writer-director Damian Mc Carthy works up several more big scares and, in between them, a lot of hushed conversations that don’t always feel rooted in the particulars of human behavior, driven instead more by the necessity of keeping the cast of a small-scale production manageable. Oddity has elements of a gothic chamber piece – hidden secrets, gaslighting-adjacent lies, that sort of thing – where a few committed actors with memorable faces can serve as walking special effects in place of the usual ghostly shrieks and jumps. As the movie presses forward, however, Mc Carthy’s exacting style becomes increasingly workmanlike. Here’s an example: In a scene late in the movie, one character gingerly approaches a ghastly-looking life-sized doll, and excavates some objects from inside its head. It’s a little creepy at first, yet nothing she produces feels especially uncanny or unexpected, not least because we don’t know a whole lot about this character. It’s as if the movie is holding us in that scene because it can, not because it’s actually especially frightening. The wooden doll makes for a great image, but is it an indelible force of unknowable evil? Not really. It’s mostly just good production design.
And so Oddity is simultaneously an impressive production and a bizarre lesson in the vagaries of fear: without visibly shifting its tactics, it can be shiver-inducing in a few scenes and tedious in others. Throughout, the most interesting figure is Bracken’s Darcy, who at times seems to try willing herself into the kind of vengeful spirit that might haunt objects from her store. But while the little tricks and twists Mc Carthy throws into the story are modestly satisfying, they lack the mystery and atmosphere of great horror. This is more like a 68-minute Universal Studios release from the mid-1940s, or a pretty good TV anthology episode from the 1970s (either would work for the cabinet-of-curiosities presentation early on) – only with an extra half-hour of runtime appended to make a modern feature film. You’d think a movie called Oddity would take that time to get a little freakier.
Director: Damian Mc Carthy
Writer: Damian Mc Carthy
Starring: Carolyn Bracken, Gwilym Lee, Caroline Menton, Tadhg Murphy
Release Date: July 19, 2024
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.
