Oddity (2024)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Mannequin About Town

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Damian Mc Carthy's Irish horror tale Oddity snaps together quite cunningly and cannily with only a few moving pieces, but the centerpiece is the creepy, practical, wooden mannequin that will likely haunt your nightmares.

Dr. Ted Timmis (Gwilym Lee) and his wife Dani (Carolyn Bracken) are fixing up a huge house in the Irish countryside. Dani is doing most of the work, as Ted is currently working nights. One night, there's a knock at the door. A man named Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy) warns her that there's a man in her house, and if she'll let him in, he can help. Dani does not survive that night.

Some time later, Ted is dating Yana (Caroline Menton) and still living in the house. He visits Dani's twin sister, Darcy (Carolyn Bracken), who runs a curiosity shop and makes a living doing readings for people. She gifts a large, terrifying wooden mannequin to Ted, and then shows up one night under the assumption that she has been invited for dinner. Yana is forced to stay with her while Ted goes to work. Strange things begin happening, Yana discovers something odd about the mannequin, and thinks there may even be ghosts in the house. But Darcy holds the most brutal secret of all.

Written and directed by Damian Mc Carthy (Caveat), Oddity relies on its incredible country house for its rich atmosphere, a kind of fortress at which visitors drive inside a courtyard and are surrounded on all sides. It gets dark there, and there are many unidentifiable sounds. And the place is big, weirdly and sparsely decorated, with catwalks and trap doors.

There are only seven characters, two of which are gone after the prologue, and another that only appears toward the end. The few characters are perfectly placed within the frame, like points on a map, to maximize the unsettling feeling. (The mannequin sits at the head of an absurdly large, heavy, wooden table, which spreads its seated occupants far apart.) Given the small cast, Mc Carthy daringly reveals the true murderer early, but keeps the suspense going with the question of how or when they'll be caught, and by something human, or something supernatural?

The beats are slow, yet click exactly right, all the way up to a delicious ending, using a small prop introduced earlier (it's most satisfying). Best of all is that Oddity manages to strike a peculiar tone somewhere between playful and sinister. It's smart and self-aware, but it takes its horrors seriously.