Over the last decade a crop of talented horror filmmakers has emerged from Ireland, with the likes of Lee Cronin (The Hole in the Ground) and Kate Dolan (You Are Not My Mother) quickly snapped up by Hollywood to helm instalments of the Evil Dead and M3GAN franchises. On the basis of his 2021 debut, Caveat, I suspected writer/director Damian McCarthy might be the most talented of this bunch, and his second film, Oddity, confirms my suspicions. In just two films, McCarthy has displayed more creativity, ingenuity and originality than many genre filmmakers manage across an entire filmography. As with Caveat, there are moments in Oddity that will have horror fans leaning forward and thinking "Well, that's something I haven't seen before."
You'll be thinking this within a few minutes as McCarthy opens his film with a novel and terrifying sequence that makes you wonder how it's never been done before. Alone at night in her new and yet to be furnished home in rural Ireland, Dani (Carolyn Bracken) hears a knock on the front door. Opening its peephole she's greeted by the sight of a nervous, lank-haired man (Tadhg Murphy) with one glass eye who goes by the name of Olin (the character was previously the subject of McCarthy's 2103 short How Olin Lost his Eye). Olin reveals himself as a former inmate of the psychiatric institution where Dani's husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) is employed as a doctor, and he claims he witnessed a man enter Dani's house when she left the door open as she went looking for her phone in her car. Dani finds herself in a quandary. Does she stay in the house with one potential psycho or trust Olin and let him in to look around? Bracken plays the part with a palpable frustration as she tries to assess the situation, and we're given the impression she doesn't want to be seen as prejudiced towards Olin while also understandably apprehensive about his intentions. It's a nerve-wracking opening that draws on the famous prologue of When a Stranger Calls while adding its own twist.
We don't learn what decision Dani took, but we do learn that it cost her life. Olin is later found in a halfway house with his head smashed in. A year later Ted pays a visit to Dani's blind sister D'Arcy (also played by Bracken), who runs a curio shop filled with creepy oddities including the mangy bunny toy from Caveat (McCarthy seems to be fashioning his own "Waniverse" within his films). D'Arcy claims she has the psychic ability to tell what went through a dead person's mind in their final moments, simply by touching one of their personal possessions. She has requested Olin's glass eye, hoping it will reveal what really happened to Dani that night. A man of logic and science, Ted doesn't believe in such nonsense, but he presents D'Arcy with the glass eye and reveals that he has a new girlfriend in the form of Yana (Caroline Menton), a snooty sales rep he claims he met in the aftermath of Dani's murder.
A week later Ted and Yana are surprised to receive a large locked wooden trunk, and even more shocked when D'Arcy arrives at their door unannounced. Having sent the trunk ahead of her arrival, D'Arcy reveals its contains a full-sized wooden figure that resembles a cross between a tobacconist's Indian and the medical mannequin from cult '80s horror Pin. Ted has a shift at the madhouse that evening, leaving Yana alone with D'Arcy, who begins to ask a lot of uncomfortable questions.
If Caveat played like a cross between Edgar Allan Poe and EC Comics, Oddity is a hybrid of a '70s Amicus chiller and Clive Barker's twisted tales of suburban sociopaths. D'Arcy's curiosity shop, filled with items she claims bring misfortune to anyone who might steal them, is clearly influenced by Peter Cushing's antique store from the Amicus anthology From Beyond the Grave. As was usually the case with the segments of Amicus's portmanteau films, the action here plays out largely in a single location and is centred around an eccentric figure, in this case D'Arcy. As with Amicus, there's plenty of wry humour here, much of it generated via the abrasive dynamic between D'Arcy and Yana, two women with very different philosophies, one spiritual, one superficial.
In an era obsessed with "elevated horror" and explorations of "trauma," Oddity is a refreshingly old-fashioned tale of awful people getting their comeuppance via the supernatural in classic EC Comics fashion. Like Caveat, McCarthy closes his latest with a shot that resembles the final splash page of a 1950s horror comic, a devillish denouement that reminds us just how much fun the horror genre can be when a filmmaker is more concerned with scaring his viewers than lecturing them, and isn't afraid to risk being dismissed as "silly" by more cynical viewers.
While McCarthy's films nod to clear influences (I can tell he spent his childhood Friday nights watching the same horror movies on British TV as I once did), they're filled with moments of gob-smacking originality. I won't go into details, but there's a bit where Yana decides to take a closer look at the wooden dummy that is like nothing I've seen before. As a kid when I would watch horror movies with my mum, she would often declare "Who comes up with these ideas?" It's not a question you find yourself asking all that much of horror movies now, as even the best ones rarely present you with something you haven't seen before. I'm not sure if McCarthy is the best horror filmmaker working today, but nobody can touch him when it comes to ideas.
Of course, a great idea isn't much good if you can't pull it off and integrate it successfully into your narrative. That's not an issue for McCarthy, who has proven himself a consummate horror storyteller. He knows just the right amount of information to give his audience at any given moment, keeping us guessing until it serves the story better to show us what's behind the curtain. He has a commendable understanding of the importance of establishing a setting, and like the remote cottage of Caveat, the home here plays an integral part as characters move up and down its two levels. McCarthy establishes its geography early on, which aids in building tension later on as characters move through its halls and peer over balconies. Details that seem initially innocuous are later revealed to play a substantial role in the narrative. McCarthy's filmmaking is meticulous and calculated, but never feels cold or sterile. He knows how to get under your skin, and which buttons to press at the right time. If Hollywood comes calling, as I suspect it will, I hope he can maintain his distinct flavour.
Directed by: Damian McCarthy
Starring: Carolyn Bracken, Gwilym Lee, Tadhg Murphy, Caroline Menton, Jonathan French, Steve Wall
