It’s the dead of night. You hear a thundering knock at your door. You open the peephole to find a man with a glass eye and a mad glare. He claims somebody has entered your house and you’re in danger, but he is here to save you. He offers to come inside for protection. Do you let him in? 

Isolated in a countryside house, far from the reach of any police assistance (or phone signal), this is the question that Dani (Carolyn Bracken) faces in the opening minutes of Damian Mc Carthy’s supernatural horror Oddity. In posing this question, Mc Carthy not only delivers a character into a dread-inducing spiral with little need for exposition but also invites the audience to ponder the same query. We aren’t immediately privy to Dani’s decision, enhancing the mystery and exacerbating the universal fear of someone breaking into your home with malevolent ambitions.

The terrors of a home invasion are both familiar and relatable. Horror auteurs of multiple generations have attempted to put their stamp on what happens when intruders cross the physical boundary of our front doors. Michael Haneke set a divisive tone with Funny Games (1997); Fede Álvarez flipped the script on the invaders in 2016 with Don’t Breathe; and Brian Duffield brought the extraterrestrial inside just last year with No One Will Save You. In all of these cases, those at home are left to fight for their security, marking the narrative direction in which Mc Carthy takes a turn for the better. 

While this compelling and tension-packed opener may suggest the direction of the home invasion, it is rather a gateway to greater genre frameworks. The narrative takes a surprising leap forward in time, and we pick up with Ted (Gwilym Lee) a doctor at a criminal psychiatric hospital, and apparent widower to Dani. He meets Dani’s blind twin sister Darcy (Carolyn Bracken in an eerie and magnificent double role), at her little shop of horrors, where her greatest defense against shoplifting is the threat that every object in her store is haunted. By looks alone, I would be easily convinced. 

To Ted, however, a self-proclaimed man of logic and science, curation of the obscure is nothing more than child’s play for those easily persuaded. Ted is not at the curio to entertain the arcane, but rather deliver something of interest to Darcy–the glass eye of the man who confronted her sister. It then becomes clear that this man, Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy), and his actions (or inactions) of that cursed night are set to become Darcy’s next target of curation. 

Building on his directorial debut Caveat (2020), which introduced a fascination with supernatural objects, Mc Carthy takes a major stride forward in production value while maintaining the calculated pace and deliberate rhythm that is beginning to define his sensibility as a filmmaker in the horror genre. Distinctly aware of the tropes he is navigating, Mc Carthy successfully subverts many through meticulous photography and an acute ability to instill fear within something as simple as the click of a camera shutter. The house that serves as the primary setting is a labyrinthian nightmare set forth by production designer Lauren Kelly, occupied by streams of flashlights and a hand-carved wooden man (gifted by Darcy to Ted and his mistress with perverse intentions).

After the opening confrontation, and despite the narrative launch forward, what ultimately drives the audience’s interest is the murder mystery that unfolds. Rather than playing out the familiar beats of a linear home invasion, Mc Carthy crafts a whodunnit shrouded by occult iconography. In blending these frameworks, the Oddity experience is an anxious one. Doors are portals of panic and objects are mysteries of magic. The screenwriting is honed just enough to reveal the necessary pieces without giving away the entire puzzle. 

Not without trivial missteps in the third act, Oddity is a confident second feature, and Bracken’s double dose of dread leads the way on a product that will leave you double-checking the locks when you get home.

Review Courtesy of Danny Jarabek

Feature Image Credit Courtesy of Fantasia Fest