Oddity
by Hope Madden
Back in 2021, writer/director Damian Mc Carthy cast a spook house spell, rattling chains and all, with his pithy survival story Caveat. He’s back, and with him another claustrophobic but gorgeous supernatural tale of familial grievance.
Carolyn Bracken is Darcy, twin sister of the recently slain Dani (also Bracken). Darcy is a little touched—she still runs the curiosity/antique shop her mother left her and still holds on to the giant wooden man a witch gave her parents for their wedding. Darcy is also blind, so when she arrives at her brother-in-law’s home—the very spot where Dani came to her bloody end—Ted (Gwilym Lee) and his new live-in girlfriend (Caroline Menton) don’t know how to politely ask her to leave. And to take her giant wooden friend with her.
Oddity stitches together a handful of common enough ideas with a few real surprises. More importantly, Mc Carthy hands this tapestry of folklore and soap opera to a nimble cast and a gifted cinematographer. Together this team casts a spell too fun to break.
Mc Carthy’s framing inside and around the house where Dani died is gorgeous, surfaces of buttery caramel colors that shine and echo with the clicks of heels or rattle of ghosts. And when we’re not in this haunted space we’re in the age-old horror stomping grounds of a mental asylum—filmed rigidly and hopelessly, as if to suggest that the science of men is cruel and ugly.
But that beautiful, buttery home—Darcy and the wooden man have claimed that and they have no fear of men and science.
Both Lee and Menton deliver solid performances, while Steve Wall and Tadhg Murphy are flip sides of a terrifying coin. But Bracken owns Oddity—at first the warm and engaging Dani, authentic enough to make you mourn her, and then the elegantly spooky Darcy. Bracken, who was so terrifying and feral in Kate Dolan’s 2022 horror You Are Not My Mother, frightens in a very different way here.
At times Oddity suffers from a throwback sensibility—like an old Tales from the Darkside episode. But there’s no denying Mc Carthy’s talent for creating an atmosphere where anything can happen.
