As proven with his 2020 film Caveat , writer/director Damian Mc Carthy isn't afraid to swing for the fences. The premise of that movie, in which an amnesiac agrees to watch over a young girl so long as he keeps himself tethered to certain portions of the house with a heavy chain, starts at a more ambitious level than many of Mc Carthy's peers and only gets weirder and wilder from there. While his latest film, Oddity , starts with a slightly more conventional premise, the filmmaker continues to push boundaries by not only borrowing tried-and-true horror methods to terrify audiences, but he also blends them in ways that feel fresh and unique, all without having to sacrifice his propensity to make the most outlandish experience entirely horrifying.
Serving essentially as a prologue, Oddity 's opening minutes see Dani (Carolyn Bracken) alone in her remote house waiting for her husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) to return from his job at a psychiatric institution. Alarmed by a knock at the door, one of Ted's former patients arrives claiming to have seen an intruder enter Dani's home. Audiences then learn that Dani was found murdered, seemingly by this patient.
One year later, Dani's twin sister Darcy (also played by Bracken) drops by Ted's home, where he spends time with his new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton), as Darcy brings along with her a life-sized wooden figure of a man whose face is frozen in agony. As one could imagine, a series of bizarre encounters unfold centering around Yana and Darcy, as Darcy's claims of being a medium lead her to claim that someone else was responsible for Dani's death.
In addition to Oddity being as uncompromising and inventive in its approach to terror as Caveat , the films also both largely unfold in a single location. Given that the home in Oddity is meant to be full of family memories, it's not as immediately ominous as what is seen in Caveat , but it's not without its ever-present and intimidating fear. Long hallways and dark alcoves lead the characters, and viewers themselves, to question if we're really seeing what we thought we saw, making it easy for Mc Carthy to craft a number of evocative and tense sequences that question what could be hiding just out of sight.
Mc Carthy's previous film earned strong reactions from the genre crowd, with that reaction seemingly emboldening him and building his confidence as a filmmaker. His vision of terror in Oddity is unrelenting, effective, and confident, no matter how ludicrous some of the encounters might seem. While Oddity is definitively a linear narrative, the various concepts Mc Carthy explores feel like they could have their origins in classic anthology films, as he seamlessly weaves together terror around the ideas of home invasions, haunted houses, and creature features. It's not that Mc Carthy can't decide what he wants his movie to be, as the experience instead feels like once he lulls you into a relative comfort of understanding the type of terror you're in store for, only to pull the rug out from under you.
What's especially impressive is that, whether it's real-world threats or ghastly phantoms, Mc Carthy's staging, pacing, and timing all manage to create some truly jarring scares. A number of movies, especially those being released by big American studios, treat horror movies as methods to deliver jump scares and little else, with Oddity first delivering a sense of unease throughout the entire run time, which is then amplified by these ferocious jolts. Oddity would still be effective without the jump scares, yet Mc Carthy delivers massive scares to audiences who have been on edge since the movie's opening moments.
With a key component of the plot involving a human-sized mannequin perched precariously at a dinner table, as well as Darcy being the blind owner of an oddities shop where she claims she can connect with the dead by touching objects that belonged to them, there's some inherent absurdity to the whole ordeal. Luckily, stars Brackon, Lee, and Menton (as well as one of Ted's orderlies Ivan, played by Steve Wall) all understood the tone Mc Carthy was striving for. Their performances are all heightened to match the absurdity of the events that are unfolding, though without descending into anything downright cartoonish. The whole cast all manage to ride that fine line of delivering authentic performances that match the exaggerated nature of the genre, yet without winking at the audience or one another that they're in on just how cuckoo the entire endeavor is for these characters.
Oddity is likely to go down as one of the scariest movies of the year, and deservedly so, though by cramming so many different concepts into the same story, audiences will be left feeling a bit bewildered. There are many questions that the film raises about what really happened in this house and, while Mc Carthy doesn't spoon-feed you all of the answers, it's difficult to deduce whether it was an artistic choice to leave some of the journeys open-ended or whether he himself couldn't settle on one definitive explanation. Still, no matter what type of horror most gets under your skin, Oddity has got you covered, as Mc Carthy proves that Caveat was no fluke and we're likely only scratching the surface of the nightmares he aims to give audiences.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Oddity hits theaters on July 19th.
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