Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy made a bit of a splash with his debut, Caveat (2020), an indie-horror shocker that more than recouped the measly 250,000 pounds spent on its production.
Oddity is McCarthy’s second film, and the raw talent revealed in Caveat gains both power and polish, anchored by an incendiary performance by Carolyn Bracken, as twin sisters Dani and Darcy Timmins—the former a murder victim, the latter a blind collector of cursed objects.
Darcy decides that her sister’s murder at the hands of an escaped mental patient (Tadhg Murphy) is just a little too coincidental, considering her sister’s husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) is a psychiatrist at the nearby asylum from whence the killer came!
As if that weren’t enough to put a bee in her bonnet, Darcy discovers that Ted has a new girlfriend (Caroline Menton) less than a year after her sister’s brutal death by bludgeoning.
Through a magic ritual involving the glass eye of the alleged killer, Darcy figures out who the real culprits are and rebrands herself as an instrument of vengeance.
The obvious care and attention to detail provided by writer-director McCarthy is a pleasure to behold—the atmosphere of the mostly single set of a remote country house successfully develops layers of menace with each scene.
The narrative is bone simple, as Darcy arranges a sinister fate for the conspirators responsible for her twin’s demise, disguised as a bizarre housewarming gift: a life-sized wooden man that appears to be distressingly ambulatory.
The actual business of the revenge plot isn’t terribly intricate, but McCarthy consistently avoids the obvious choices, and the viewer is all the better for it.
Oddity is a first-rate horror experience that belies the lack of a body count, and indicates that Damian McCarthy is emerging as a confident comer in modern genre filmmaking.
Don’t believe me? See for yourself!
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