Making good use of its drone shots – as many films do – Oddity (2024) opens on a remote, grand old house in rural Ireland which is being renovated by a woman named Dani (Carolyn Bracken). It’s one of those houses which no one you know ever lives in – all open plan, stone walls, natural light and minimalism (though to be fair, most houses being renovated go through a minimalist phase). Her husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) is a psychiatrist who mostly works the night shift, meaning Dani is doing a lot of this work alone. By the by, all that natural light gives way quite quickly to large expanses of darkness after sundown. So it’s by torch and by lamplight that creepy, unwieldy things start to happen.
In the dark, a man arrives, begging admittance. He tells Dani that he’s just seen someone sneak into the house while she was getting something from her car; it seems he’s ‘professionally familiar’ with her husband, Dr Timmis, which together with his shall we say, rather striking glass eye doesn’t exactly fill a person with confidence, but Dani still finds herself wondering if this stranger is in earnest. We see her open the door – and then we’re back at the psychiatric unit which is clearly so integral to the film, given that a grotesque murder takes place here shortly after we get another good look at the place. It’s not the most forward-thinking mental health facility ever seen: it’s positioned much more closely to some kind of nightmare Victorian asylum, truth be told, right down to the tumbledown cells, the use of restraints, the autopsy wall art…the Channard Institute looks positively modern compared to this.
If this is not enough of an…oddity, then witness our next stop: an antiques shop stuffed with possibly haunted curios, if we’re to believe the proprietor of the shop – Dani’s blind twin sister, Darcy. Ted pops by, to drop off a glass eye which belonged to the man who – ah – apparently murdered Dani on that fateful night, very nearly one year previously. Darcy, a psychic, wants to ‘read’ the item. Given Ted’s strictly rational mindset, it’s strange that he’s been so accommodating, but then he’s an accommodating man: less than a year after his wife’s passing, he already has a new live-in girlfriend. Did Darcy already know about his through her faculty of second sight? It’s unknown, but she certainly seems surprised. They make a loose plan for Darcy to visit the house, seeking some kind of closure for the loss of her twin – and Ted leaves her with the glass eye to ponder.
By just twenty minutes in, Oddity is so packed with Shudder-friendly plot points and elements that it feels positively busy, if not also strangely familiar, with everything filtered through that equally familiar stylish visual flair. That Darcy, who arrives essentially uninvited at the house soon after chatting with Ted, wants to perform a psychic experiment which for some reason involves a man-sized, golem-like heirloom feels unusually normal. Ted’s new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton), an unwitting host, has also dug out Dani’s old camera and guess what? It’s heaving with ghostly pictures. But having whisked the audience through a Generation Game-like run of supernatural plot points, the film gears up as a kind of psychic whodunnit, and – it works. Using flashback and recast, Darcy offers alternative explanations for what happened to Dani; creepy glass eye or not, she doesn’t believe that the eye-owner was guilty. She has other ideas…
There are points where you begin to guess at the involvement of other parties: Ted’s cut-glass English RP in amongst the Irish lilts, plus his remarkable ability to hurdle over the impact of his wife’s recent murder differentiate him quite markedly from the others. However, there’s still enough going on here to keep the film engaging and often unsettling. The film trips, traipses and sometimes hurtles through a melee of ideas, points and set pieces with the kind of stylish frenetic activity you’d get in a lot of classic gialli: I kept thinking of Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and Fulci’s Sette note in nero. Same vibe. There’s also a similar kind of push-pull between rationalism and supernaturalism, with cold rationalism often coming off far, far worse, in the grand scheme of things. Oddity turns out to be a pleasing, lean, mean supernatural horror which makes all of its artefacts and ideas count, and you find yourself rooting for all of its moments of bloody comeuppance, even if the camera often looks away and leaves you to it.
Oddity (2024) is available to view on VOD now.