Ted Timmis (Gwilym Lee) works overnight at the psychiatric hospital leaving his wife, Dani (Carolyn Bracken), alone in their new country home.  One night, Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy), a recently discharged patient of Ted’s knocks on the door warning Dani that there is someone inside of the house with her.  Dani is found dead the next morning, murdered, and Boole is charged with the crime.  On the one-year anniversary of Dani’s death, her twin sister Darcy (also, Carolyn Bracken), a blind medium, visits the home which is now shared with Yana (Caroline Menton), Ted’s new girlfriend. 

Damian McCarthy writes and directs Oddity which premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival and was recognized with the Audience Award in the Midnighter section ahead of its IFC-to-Shudder release.  The 98-minute Irish horror is a tight narrative that packs a real punch, pulling from various formats of scares to keep audiences on the edge of their seat the entire time.   

The film primarily takes place in an old house that is in the process of being restored by Dani, and later Yana.  The location is incredible and the two-level square shape is immediately disorienting as the house loops back and twists around itself creating a simple, yet inescapable maze.  The house is unfortunately underutilized, but that mostly comes from the fact that Oddity quickly shakes off its haunted house opening into something more targeted and personal.  Much of the film takes place in the open living space shared by the den and the dining room, sometimes breaking to the second-floor walkway allowing us to observe what is going on down below. 

McCarthy opens his film in a very tense and unnerving sequence where Olin Boole knocks on the door while Dani is alone.  Speaking through the hatch, the man is clearly troubled, but we slowly begin to doubt our own faculties along with Dani as he convinces us that someone snuck into the house when she was at the car.  Colm Hogan’s lens is pointed at an angle when we are in the courtyard that we can almost see a shadowy figure slip into the house, but at the same time, maybe it was nothing.  As the tense exchange continues, a strange creaking can be heard down the corridor, but again, maybe it was nothing.  In these opening moments, McCarthy sows some deeply unsettling seeds of a home invasion thriller without showing much at all.  What we leave this opening knowing is that Dani was brutally murdered in her new home while her husband was insulated from the danger, miles away at the office. 

From there, the film transitions forward to just shy of the one year anniversary of Dani’s Death.  Ted visits Darcy, Dani’s sister, and gives her Olin’s glass eye now that he, too, has been murdered.  In their small talk, Ted vaguely notions at the idea of having Darcy over for dinner, but is surprised when she shows up one evening as he is getting ready to leave for work.  Yana, having misplaced her keys, is stuck in the drafty, creaky old house with the sister of her fiancé’s deceased wife and an old, large crate that she had delivered earlier in the day.  McCarthy keeps the contents of the chest hidden for a while, but not for too long; a life-sized wooden idol, apparently a gift from a witch to Dani and Darcy’s mother on her wedding day.  It adds some intrigue to the story, but by and large, the film allows the idol to exist in the fringes of the frame, observing.  It is kind of shocking how little influence the idol has over the course of the film, but it allows Bracken and Menton to really shine in an extended butting of heads.  They certainly do not come to an understanding of each other, but the battle for the upper hand between the two is incredibly engaging. 

When it comes to the scares, this is where McCarthy really elevates his film beyond the simple trappings.  He does not just pull from one chapter of the horror filmmaking handbook, but rather the entire anthology in both the types of scares and the setups.  Oddity relies primarily on ambiance to unsettle its audience, but McCarthy is not afraid to utilize a jump scare either.  What makes his use of these normally cheap scares is that he does not rely on the same formula each time he uses them.  The camera and the score work differently so no pattern can truly be established, but importantly, the lead-up always seems to be indicative of a scare though oftentimes it fizzles to nothing; not a joke, not a cat crossing the frame, but simply nothing.  When we begin to realize that he is setting up another scare we are never sure what – if anything – will be waiting for us as the end of the equation.  It results in one of the strongest and most upsetting scares in a psychic flashback to the night of Dani’s murder.  During the remainder of the second act, his setups are so effective that when the idol is finally utilized late in the film, it almost feels like the air being let out of the balloon as it falls into more conventional territory.  Thankfully, though, McCarthy has built up a stock of goodwill in his audience that we are more than willing to give ourselves over to the action. 

Oddity is, to be a little cute, an odd little film in just how much it is doing and just how well it works and in such a small and concise package.  Released with little fanfare theatrically and destined for streaming, albeit a niche streamer who will not just bury the title, the film stands the unfortunate fate of being criminally underseen.  It heralds McCarthy as a director who has an innate understanding of genre and tension, though credit is also due here to Brian Philip Davis’ work on the edit.  His extrapolation of conventions helps take this story which may seem similar in the pitch but in practise, promotes them to something new, exciting, and most importantly, terrifying.