‘Oddity’: Galway Review

Dir/scr: Damian McCarthy. Eire. 2024. 98mins

Following a brutal crime in a distant nation home, a grieving lady makes an attempt to find what precisely occurred to her sister. This will likely sound like a well-known narrative, however the lady occurs to be a blind psychic with a wierd connection to a large wood model — taking Oddity into decidedly creepier, off-kilter whodunnit territory. Whereas the story on the coronary heart of the second characteristic from Irish author/director Damian McCarthy could also be, regardless of the movie’s occult trappings, essentially typical on a story stage, the director’s potential to conjure and keep a genuinely unsettling ambiance makes this Irish chiller one to observe for horror followers.

One to observe for horror followers

McCarthy’s well-received 2020 debut Caveat had a wholesome competition run, primarily at style festivals, earlier than transferring to Shudder, and now the style streamer has boarded his follow-up. Oddity involves Galway after profitable the Midnight Viewers Award at SXSW and opens within the US on July 19 via IFC (after which it performs Canada’s Fantasia). Whereas phrase of mouth might assist it draw style aficionados to the large display, it’s prone to have a broader attain in terms of Shudder later this 12 months.

Earlier than it strikes right into a extra paranormal realm, Oddity opens with relatable actual world horror. A girl, Dani (You Are Not My Mom star Carolyn Bracken), is alone within the remoted home she is renovating in the course of unspecified countryside (the movie shot in Cork) when there’s a knock on the door. An odd man with a outstanding false eye stands exterior at the hours of darkness, telling her that he noticed somebody enter the home, that she is at risk and she or he should get out. Can she imagine him? Ought to she open the door, or keep put? Both method, she’s taking a danger.

Dani’s determination — the precise particulars of which we is not going to uncover till later in a screenplay which strikes forwards and backwards in time by way of puzzle-piece flashbacks — leads to her demise. A 12 months later, her bereaved husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) is visiting her sister Darcy (additionally Bracken, glorious on this difficult twin position) in her quirky curiosity store, stuffed to the brim with eclectic, eerie objects from director McCarthy’s personal private assortment. Darcy has a expertise for psychometry, a capability to attach with individuals via touching private objects. Ted has a gift for her, the false eye of the person we noticed exterior the home who, it transpires, is a affected person on the psychiatric hospital the place Ted is a health care provider. Whereas Ted could not imagine in Darcy’s abilities, this offers her a pathway into discovering out precisely what occurred to her sister.

Whereas the route of this story could also be apparent to seasoned viewers, Oddity takes a twisting, and twisted, path to get there, serving up some memorable nightmarish moments alongside the best way — to not point out one really efficient leap scare.  The rating, from Richard G Mitchell, pulses with menace proper from the off, so the ambiance is already thick with dread by the point Darcy arrives on the home the place her sister died, now a slick, renovated residence for Ted and his new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Point out). Clearly, neither of them need her there, notably when she unpacks her large wood travelling companion — a deliciously macabre piece of design from mannequin maker Paul McDonnell, full with gaping mouth and holes in his head — who looms silently, accusingly on the kitchen desk. 

This constructing, alone in the course of a forest, turns into a personality in its personal proper. A transformed barn within the grounds of Bantry Home, County Cork, it’s the identical cavernous place wherein McCarthy constructed his units for Caveat. McCarthy and DOP Colm Hogan successfully utilise the quirky nature of the constructing — the large downstairs area, darkish corners, shadowy staircases and overhanging mezzanine — to isolate its characters, each from the surface world and one another. That’s notably efficient when Darcy and Yana (and, later, Darcy and Ted) are alone collectively, slow-boil animosity giving solution to rising terror as Darcy digs into her powers and the reality slowly reveals itself.