‘Oddity’: Galway Review

Dir/scr: Damian McCarthy. Ireland. 2024. 98mins

Following a brutal crime in a remote country house, a grieving woman attempts to discover what exactly happened to her sister. This may sound like a familiar narrative, but the woman happens to be a blind psychic with a strange connection to a giant wooden mannequin — taking Oddity into decidedly creepier, off-kilter whodunnit territory. While the story at the heart of the second feature from Irish writer/director Damian McCarthy may be, despite the film’s occult trappings, fundamentally conventional on a narrative level, the director’s ability to conjure and maintain a genuinely unsettling atmosphere makes this Irish chiller one to watch for horror fans.

One to watch for horror fans

McCarthy’s well-received 2020 debut Caveat had a healthy festival run, mainly at genre festivals, before moving to Shudder, and now the genre streamer has boarded his follow-up. Oddity comes to Galway after winning the Midnight Audience Award at SXSW and opens in the US on July 19 through IFC (after which it plays Canada’s Fantasia). While word of mouth could help it draw genre aficionados to the big screen, it is likely to have a broader reach when it comes to Shudder later this year.

Before it moves into a more paranormal realm, Oddity opens with relatable real world horror. A woman, Dani (You Are Not My Mother star Carolyn Bracken), is alone in the isolated house she is renovating in the middle of unspecified countryside (the film shot in Cork) when there is a knock on the door. A strange man with a prominent false eye stands outside in the dark, telling her that he saw someone enter the house, that she is in danger and she must get out. Can she believe him? Should she open the door, or stay put? Either way, she’s taking a risk.

Dani’s decision — the exact details of which we will not discover until later in a screenplay which moves back and forth in time via puzzle-piece flashbacks — results in her death. A year later, her bereaved husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) is visiting her sister Darcy (also Bracken, excellent in this challenging dual role) in her quirky curiosity shop, stuffed to the brim with eclectic, eerie objects from director McCarthy’s own personal collection. Darcy has a talent for psychometry, an ability to connect with people through touching personal objects. Ted has a present for her, the false eye of the man we saw outside the house who, it transpires, is a patient at the psychiatric hospital where Ted is a doctor. While Ted may not believe in Darcy’s talents, this gives her a pathway into finding out exactly what happened to her sister.

While the direction of this story may be obvious to seasoned viewers, Oddity takes a twisting, and twisted, route to get there, serving up some memorable nightmarish moments along the way — not to mention one truly effective jump scare.  The score, from Richard G Mitchell, pulses with menace right from the off, so the atmosphere is already thick with dread by the time Darcy arrives at the house where her sister died, now a slick, renovated home for Ted and his new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Mention). Clearly, neither of them want her there, particularly when she unpacks her giant wooden travelling companion — a deliciously macabre piece of design from model maker Paul McDonnell, complete with gaping mouth and holes in his head — who looms silently, accusingly at the kitchen table. 

This building, alone in the middle of a forest, becomes a character in its own right. A converted barn in the grounds of Bantry House, County Cork, it’s the same cavernous place in which McCarthy built his sets for Caveat. McCarthy and DOP Colm Hogan effectively utilise the quirky nature of the building — the huge downstairs space, dark corners, shadowy staircases and overhanging mezzanine — to isolate its characters, both from the outside world and each other. That’s particularly effective when Darcy and Yana (and, later, Darcy and Ted) are alone together, slow-boil animosity giving way to increasing terror as Darcy digs into her powers and the truth slowly reveals itself.