Oddity's horror is more than its mannequin, though that thing is pretty freaky too

With his feature debut Caveat, Irish filmmaker Damian Mc Carthy introduced us to a vivid world of strange atmosphere and unbreakable tension. With Oddity, he not only repeats that feat, but deepens and darkens his own stylistic gifts, crafting one of the year’s most memorable horror movies. After a festival run that saw it win an Audience Award at SXSW, this impish, precise exercise in carefully controlled terror is finally making its way to audiences everywhere, and if you love horror movies that make you squirm in your seat as you wait for the next shock to leap out from the shadows, you won’t want to miss it.

As with Caveat, Mc Carthy sets up Oddity as an intimate chiller largely unfolding in a single location with few key characters. The core of the story are twin sisters Dani and Darcy (both played by a wonderful Carolyn Bracken), who confront versions of the same darkness at a beautiful country home in rural Ireland. Dani arrives there with her husband, the somewhat stuffy doctor Ted (Gwilym Lee), to restore the old house and convert it into a spacious modern home for the couple, only to end up dead under mysterious circumstances while her husband’s away at work.

Cut to a year later, and Ted has already moved on, sharing the house Dani restored with his new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton), when Darcy unexpectedly shows up at their door. A blind oddities shop proprietor with a talent for “reading” objects by touching them and picking up on their psychic imprints, Darcy has gleaned new information about Dani’s death. She’s arrived at the house to try to get some closure, or perhaps some degree of revenge. But she’s not alone. Darcy’s also brought along a trunk containing a wide-mouthed, snarling mannequin with strange properties all its own.

That mannequin has already become the centerpiece and calling card of Oddity. It’s made cameo appearances at festivals, it’s become swag (I was handed a paper fan with its face on it at the SXSW premiere), and it’s front and center in all of the film’s marketing materials. It’s easy to see why. The design, by Paul McDonnell, is both satisfyingly creepy and remarkably tactile, its very shape making the viewer question whether we’re looking at a living thing or an unmoving block of wood shaped into a demonic visage. It’s a phenomenal hook, but it’s also a statement about the larger structure of the film, and the kind of tension-laden storytelling Mc Carthy seeks to play with here.

Oddity is a film deliberately built around the act of discovery and the art of reclaiming something as your own, something that mirrors Mc Carthy’s own habit of collecting strange objects which make their way into his films. The story of a woman restoring and repurposing an old building transitions into the story of a woman whose entire life is built around the discarded, the cursed, and the ignored. Dani and Darcy, each in their own way, bring a kind of magic into their world, one through restoration and the other through reexamination. When these ideas converge as Darcy returns to the site of Dani’s death for her own brand of closure, we get the story of Darcy attempting to both restore and re-examine the narrative of her family’s tragedy, reclaiming it for herself and for her now-voiceless sister.

Which brings us back, of course, to the mannequin.

In terms of pure application of cinematic craft, Oddity is a masterclass of tension building and maintenance, and much of it is centered around the appearance of the odd humanoid creation Darcy lugs along with her. For much of the film it sits static at a table, hands resting on the wooden surface, sightless eyes staring forward, mouth open wide. It might be watching you, might be waiting to clamp its jaws shut around your wandering fingers, might even be summoning its strength to get up and walk. Or it might be none of those things. It might just be a hunk of dead organic matter that Darcy finds amusing. Whatever it really is, Mc Carthy treats it as a fully formed character from the beginning, which means that from the moment it arrives, the film’s cinematography, editing, and pacing are all dependent on where the mannequin is and what it’s doing (or not doing). That focus, along with its gloriously creepy design, is enough to keep you on the edge of your seat from the beginning.

But just as Caveat was a high-concept psychological drama that slowly unfolded into something more emotional (and more terrifying), Oddity is a film that grows beyond the admittedly compelling grip of its central creature. One of the first lines in Mc Carthy’s script is one sister telling the other, “We are connected.” While she’s just talking about finding a phone signal in the middle of nowhere, it’s still an emotional mission statement for the film. As two sisters at opposite ends of the same story, their souls straining to pull back together, Bracken is phenomenal, imbuing Dani with remarkable humanity in brief flashbacks and making Darcy into a character so playful, so gleefully full of secret knowledge, that she feels like she could have emerged from a 1930s James Whale chiller. Because of her, every ounce of tension Mc Carthy milks from his camera is dialed, and every dose of humor is deepened, because we are all too aware that she knows things other characters simply cannot. It’s basic dramatic irony, and while it occasionally plays as Oddity pretending to be more clever than it actually is, at its best it’s almost Hitchcockian in the way it helps to apply supernatural suspense.

All of this makes Oddity a ferociously entertaining, beautifully orchestrated thrill ride that’s exactly the kind of horror movie you want to watch with a crowd. It’s got great tension, great characters, and great jump scares, and it cements Mc Carthy’s place as a major new voice in horror.