Oddity: A smart, unnerving chiller
Review Overview
Cast
8Concept
8Creeps
8Ivan Radford | On 06, Oct 2024
Director: Damian McCarthy
Cast: Carolyn Bracken, Gwilym Lee, Caroline Menton, Steve Wall, Tadhg Murphy
Certificate: 15
You’re alone in a half-built house. A disturbing man (Tadgh Murphy) knocks on the door and tells you that someone else has snuck in the building. Do you believe them? Do you let them in? That’s the dilemma facing Dani (Carolyn Bracken) at the start of Oddity – and the terrifyingly simple opening sets the tone for a horror film that works because it is as grounded and tangible as it is properly weird and scary.
The action proper starts a year on from that ill-fated intro, as Dani’s husband, Ted (Gwilym Lee), now lives in the same fully renovated home with Yana (Caroline Menton). One day, they have an unexpected visitor in the form of Darcy (Carolyn Bracken), Dani’s twin sister, who suspects that the man who knocked on Dani’s door that night was right all along.
What ensues is a twisting little puzzle-box that is part crime mystery, part supernatural tale and part survival thriller. The cast drift between the genres with character-driven ease. Caroline Menton is superb as Ted’s rude romantic partner, increasingly paralysed with simultaneous terror and a determination to find out what’s going on. Gwilym Lee, meanwhile, is wonderfully understated as the psychiatrist who keeps his emotions close to his chest but clings to science and rational explanations in way that gives away his secrets.
Carlin Bracken is undoubtedly the star of the show, though, delivering double the goods as the twins. Dani is immediately likeable and grounded, but Darcy is a fascinatingly ethereal presence, almost floating above the scenery with a waif-like distance, at once connected to everything around her and haunting from afar. A blind clairvoyant, she has no trouble making herself at home in Dani’s former house – she meets Yana’s hostility with an amusingly blunt confidence of her own – even though she seems most comfortable in her shop of curiosities that is bursting with unanswered enigmas and riddles.
Damian McCarthy’s script leaves us to wonder about of a lot of things, even as it snaps the puzzle pieces together with efficient precision. Daring to keep things claustrophobic and intimate, he crafts a gorgeously atmospheric chamber piece that comprises only a few rooms but contains enough cavernous chills to swallow us whole. Some inspired set pieces – including one nerve-racking sequence involving a wooden man – pack genuine tension and fear, as the film veers away from an emotional journey and into stranger territory. There’s something satisfyingly spooky about McCarthy’s low-key approach to storytelling, offering logical answers to our urgent questions, while taking the enchanted and unexplained at face value. A smart, unnerving chiller.