Now on Shudder: 'Oddity' Is An Entire Cursed Object Shoppe's Worth Of Fright

By Jason Adams | Film | September 29, 2024 |

By Jason Adams | Film | September 29, 2024 |

It’s a neat trick, to make your horror movie feel like an anthology film when it’s not. But Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy (previously of Caveat) pulls exactly that nutty feat off with terrifying aplomb in Oddity, his latest deeply creepy horror creation that’s hitting U.S. theaters this weekend before premiering in Canada at the Fantasia Film Festival next week. Stories within stories, boxes within boxes, work to propel Oddity forward, all while McCarthy’s now two-films-deep patented brand of slow-burn suspense steeps us in each interconnected set-piece until the tension feels nigh unbearable. Oddity is a pipin’ hot concoction of creep, y’all!

The antique shoppe (old-timey spelling a must) of cursed objects is one of my most favorite horror tropes—yes okay the Friday the 13th television series was a big bag of fetid trash but nevertheless I was the exact right age for it, and it lit a fire in my tween imagination so I can never get enough of this kind of thing. Whenever Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga hang out in the Warrens’ storage room of diabolical dolls and haunted mirrors in the Conjuring movies I find myself getting giddy.

Oddity doesn’t exactly center on such a shoppe, but one is involved in its plot, and much of the horrific drama the film unfurls seems to have come right from that place. The shoppe is run by a white-blonde blind woman named Darcy (Carolyn Bracken), who is grieving the death of her twin sister Dani (also Bracken, just brunette) one year previous when we meet her.

Indeed in the gangbusters opening scene the film begins by showing us the night of terror that Dani endured, stopping just short of its tragic end. And it plays out like an ancient urban legend come to scary life. Dani is at home alone in her isolated new home when there’s a knock at the door. Outside is a frenzied man with one white glass eye who tells her he just saw someone sneak into her house, and she needs to escape. Like right now. Or else. He does not seem like a man to be trusted, but also… she literally just heard a noise on the staircase. What do you do?

We don’t find out what Dani did and what was done to Dani until much later. What matters is that one year later Dani’s husband Ted (Gwilym Lee from The Great) has already hooked up with a co-worker named Yana (Caroline Menton, who very nearly steals the entire film) and remodeled the home where Dani died for them to live together, and Darcy isn’t terribly happy about any of this. And so Darcy decides to pay the two lovebirds an unannounced visit.

She does not arrive alone. From the backroom of her cursed curio shoppe—where eagle-eyed viewers may notice the terrifying rabbit doll from McCarthy’s film Caveat sitting on a shelf there among many other deliciously sinister looking items—Darcy brings with her an enormous wooden box, the contents of which we don’t see until the film’s midpoint. But seeing as how he’s played such a big role in the film’s advertising (indeed that’s him in the image at the top of this review) I’ll go ahead and spoil that much—within the box is a life-sized wooden man.

Blessedly we never see the man within the box, nor do we see him removed from the box. He is just suddenly sitting at the table of Ted and Yana’s dining room, propped in a chair. And with a face gnarled in anguish as if someone tried to carve a Francis Bacon painting out of oak, he does not make for the most comforting of guests. But Darcy says he’s their housewarming gift (he was Dani and Darcy’s mother’s wooden man once), and since nobody wants to be terribly rude to the grieving blind woman there he sits.

Darcy wields her disabled status cunningly, playing hard on the couple’s guilt. When she arrives at their door Ted was about to leave for a night-shift at the asylum where he works as a doctor (because of course). And Yana was about to drive into the city to stay at her own apartment, seeing as how staying in the house by herself at night has really been creeping her out. (She’s been… seeing things.) But now Darcy is here, and Darcy emphatically does not want to leave. So she says she will stay in the house all by herself then. (With her large wooden friend, that is.)

From there complications arise, and spoiling any more would be cruel—McCarthy’s script is aces at tossing a dozen balls in the air at once and then juggling them individually, one by one, while the others wait patiently, ohhh so patiently, to fall right on our terrified heads. He sets up a heap of herrings, some red but most surprisingly not—this is a world full of curses after all, and this un-merry company is mired right in the thick of them.

Like the opening scene that plays with a familiar urban legend, McCarthy seems to know all of the horror scenarios, and wants to muck about with each and every one of them in turn. The blind woman in peril; the cheating couple getting their just deserts; the dark house in the middle of nowhere set upon by inexplicable forces. This is a haunted house movie, a revenge thriller, a relationship drama, an asylum horror—it’s got twins and masks and gigantic wooden men and Chekov’s little bell that you just know somebody is gonna ring when we were told explicitly not to ring the damn thing right off the bat. But it miraculously doesn’t feel overstuffed—this isn’t a season of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story, spraying everything at the wall and hoping something sticks. There is method, horrifying method, to McCarthy’s madness.

McCarthy draws all of these plots out to deliciously excruciating lengths, edging us toward all hell breaking loose by turning it into a shell game—by its last act we don’t know where to look to be afraid because the scare could be coming from a dozen different places. The film trains us to peer into its many many inscrutable darknesses, looking for its monster, grimly unsure which monstrous face might be suddenly peering back. It’s overload underplayed, and it’s a magnificent feat of trickery.

Special mention must be given to the performances too—I already mentioned Menton’s killer work at playing “the other woman”, but the way the film uses her is stand-up-and-cheer-worthy in its unexpected twist on that oft-cliched role. Meanwhile Lee does a very good job at keeping us unmoored from how much we’re supposed to distrust Ted—there’s something very Christopher Lee about him here, where nastiness and charisma thrum hand in hand.

But the film belongs to Bracken in her dual roles as the twin sisters, and she delivers two performances so special and so different that I had to double-check the credits to make absolute sure they were indeed played by the same actress. She’s a marvel, tempering perhaps misplaced fury with sympathy and vice versa at every turn and twist of this turning, twisting, terrifying thing. Stumbling into Darcy’s cursed object shoppe was, as is often the case, both a blessing and a curse, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. My soul for a franchise!