Director/Screenplay – Damian McCarthy, Producers – Katie Holly, Evan Horan, Mette-Marie Kongsved & Laura Tunstall, Photography – Colm Hogan, Music – Richard G. Mitchell, Makeup Design – Ruth O’Rourke, Production Design – Lauren Kelly, Wooden Man Design – Paul McDonnell. Production Company – Nowhere/Keeper Pictures.
Cast
Carolyn Bracken (Dani Timmis/Darcy Odello), Gwilym Lee (Ted Timmis), Caroline Menton (Yana), Tadgh Murphy (Olin Boole), Steve Wall (Ivan), Jonathan French (Declan Barrett)
Plot
Psychiatrist Ted Timmis and his wife Dani have moved into a house outside of Cork. She is spending the night in the house alone when she is visited by Olin Boole, one of Ted’s patients, who warns her that someone is trying to kill her. Dani is then found murdered and Olin is arrested as the killer. One year later, on the anniversary of Dani’s death, her twin sister, the blind Darcy Odello, who runs a shop selling occult curios in the city, comes to visit and insists on staying despite the reluctance of Ted and his new girlfriend Yana. Darcy also brings with her a strange life-size wooden mannequin of a human figure. In the house, Darcy begins to pick up impressions from touched objects and realises that Olin was not Dani’s killer.
Oddity was the second full-length film for Damian McCarthy, who had first appeared with the horror film Caveat (2020) after making a series of short films throughout the 2010s. The film played at a number of international film festivals before being released to the Shudder network.
Oddity is ostensibly a Clairvoyance thriller. There have been a good many of these, which usually tend to being murder mysteries where the clairvoyant is essentially a detective who picks up psychic hunches instead of finds clues. See the likes of see the likes of Baffled! (1972), The Eyes of Charles Sand (1972), Visions (1972), Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) and In Dreams (1999), among others. Most of these are tedious and mundane all but for the central premise. So it is quite a surprise when Damian McCarthy upends the genre as an unfolding mystery where the emphasis is on creating an unsettlingly uncanny mood.
Caroline Menton (l) and blind psychic Carolyn Bracken (r) at the table with the wooden man
Oddity is a film where Damian McCarthy generates some really quite spooky atmosphere in no time at all. The scenes where Carolyn Bracken’s Dani is spending the night inside the tent and masked figures abruptly pop out at her leaves you starting in your seat. There is a reasonable tension generated around the prologue scenes where patient Tadgh Murphy turns up at the door – interestingly, McCarthy never shows us the attack itself, although this is to leave uncertainty about what happened and who did what for later in the film. And in the midst of proceedings, we are introduced to the uncanny figure of the wooden man with its mouth open and a series of personal objects placed in the holes in its head, where the wooden figure is sometimes unnervingly seen with its head tilted back in a scream or looking up at people on the balcony overhead.
The film becomes particularly eerie when Carolyn Bracken’s Darcy settles into the house with the wooden man sitting at one end of the table and she still with hands splayed and head down seemingly asleep at the other end – both are motionless, but there is such a sense of the uncanny that you keep expecting either to move at any moment. This also becomes the point that the film starts to introduce some twists on what we know as Darcy unveils her clairvoyant abilities and starts to pick up impressions. The latter quarter of the show proceeds less interestingly in the direction of wrapping up the thriller, although Damian McCarthy still manages to deliver an unnerving final shot to the film.
(Nominee for Best Director (Damian McCarthy) at this site’s Best of 2024 Awards).
