Oddity

by Mike McGranaghan

You wouldn’t want a horror movie called Oddity to be routine, right? Thankfully, this Irish chiller more than lives up to its title. Better still is that its inherent oddness is precisely what makes it work. You don’t know where this crazy story is going until you suddenly end up at a place where everything makes perfect sense.

Psychiatrist Ted Timmis (Gwilym Lee) is a widower whose wife is murdered by one of his patients in the beautiful country estate they’re fixing up. A year later, he’s dating Yana (Caroline Menton), a pharmaceutical rep he met on the job. She’s forced to spend nights alone in the place while he works, a fact that greatly displeases her. Just as Yana convinces Ted to let her head back to the city, his sister-in-law Darcy (You Are Not My Mother’s Carolyn Bracken) shows up unexpectedly. She owns an antique store filled with cursed objects. Believe it or not, Darcy isn’t the oddity referred to by the title. That would be the creepy wooden mannequin she brings with her.

Oddity doesn’t have a traditional arc. The story jumps all over the place, sometimes even back and forth in time. It’s structured like one of those slide puzzles where you have to rearrange the tiles in order to see what the picture is. Writer/director Damian McCarthy keeps adding new pieces of information that leave you questioning how they fit together with the previous pieces. Things click into place during the final half-hour, revealing the true deviousness of the plot. Once you find out what’s really taking place, the effect is satisfying.

The performances are very much in line with the title, as well. Yana is the most normal character; she’s our proxy. Lee plays Ted with a strange aloofness. Even in the most bizarre of situations, he’s calm, speaking in a mannerly way that doesn’t quite sound like actual human speech. Bracken gives Darcy an icy, detached personality, making everything she says and does feel ominous. Since we know she’s into items that are allegedly haunted, that wooden man is like an extension of her. With a menacing scream-face, he’s clearly Darcy’s collaborator in whatever she’s up to. Also factoring in is one of Ted’s orderlies, Ivan (Steve Wall), a guy who seems like he should be a patient in a psychiatric hospital rather than a worker.

Part of what’s cool about Oddity is that the wooden mannequin doesn’t do what a lot of horror films would have him do. His function is more insidious than expected. Because the movie declines to go with cliché, a sense of unease is built whenever the camera cuts to it. The figure’s presence looms over the story when we aren’t viewing him, too.

To a degree, Oddity loses a touch of substance by choosing to embrace eccentricity. Unlike many other indie/foreign fright films, no attempt is made to dive into any bigger themes. The plot is too busy assembling itself to go for psychological depth. Not that it matters when the result is this much eerie fun. As the screen goes black at the end, it’s hard not to be impressed by the ingenuity of what you’ve just seen.

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