3 out of 5

Directed by: Damian McCarthy

Another perfectly designed prop; another amazing set; another small but effectively directed cast; and significant dollops of atmosphere: writer / director Damian McCarthy may be reusing the framework from his debut feature, Caveat, but Oddity is a standalone experience with its own identity (and scares, and tics, and pluses and minuses).

Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is prepping / renovating the country home she and her husband, Ted (Gwilym Lee), have purchased. It’s in a barebones state, lacking cell service in all but one corner, sans most furniture at this point; Dani is staying in a tent in the main room while she is completing the work. Ted – lead psychiatrist at a hospital – is away for the evening, when there’s a knock on the door: Olin, a patient of Ted’s, has come to warn Dani: he saw someone enter the house. But… why was Olin watching the house? What would he even do to help, if Dani were to let him in?

The opening sequence introducing these characters, and up through this interrogation between Olin and Dani, is quite perfect. As with Caveat, McCarthy has a great sense of framing, and how to embellish the creepiness of quiet; DP Colm Hogan works wonders with color and lighting to give the large estate of our central set the same sense of confinement and a “living” environment as the comparatively tiny and rundown set of Caveat had, but arrived at by different means, underlining the ‘same but different’ framing previously mentioned. And though McCarthy still shows a preference for some odd cuts, even with a different editor than Caveat – cut to a character, away, and then back, and they have a kind of discordant expression, like we’ve missed a beat in the conversation – editor Brian Philip Davis’ work is otherwise spot-on for building and maintaining the film’s tension, and crawling – but also very motivated – pace.

However… we do a “one year later” after the sequence with Dani, and after establishing some basic “what happened”s in the intervening year – namely: Dani died that night, murdered by Olin; Ted has taken up with a new lady, Yana (Caroline Menton) – Oddity is never able to recover the exacting, and intense feelings of its opening. McCarthy seems very aware of this, and uses the aforementioned prop and some Chekov’s Gun-like nods to let us know: I get that you probably know where this is going, and still I owe you some scares, and I’ll do my duty. And he does! With Dani’s twin sister, the blind medium Darcy (also Bracken) joining Ted and Yana at the now-completed estate, bringing with her some, y’know, oddities from her shoppe of curios, the movie kicks over into a smirking, baiting/waiting game for said scares to appear. Some really work; some are just kind of punchline payoffs, but they’re fun. I don’t mean to suggest the screams are constant – McCarthy’s m.o. is clearly slow and steady, and he adores building up and up to the jump, delaying it past the expected point for kicks – but everything you’d want to pay off in some way does.

Some of the storytelling is a bit overwrought: Olin’s eventual fate feels like it’s shot just to give Caveat star Johnny French a cameo; and because McCarthy wanted to (or budget-wise had to) go with the minimalist approach in terms of cast and settings, it’s hard to really buy into the world outside of the house – Ted’s job as a psychiatrist might as well just be him sitting alone in a room, for example. And I’ll say that the movie is tense, but not scary. Which feels like a miss. In both Caveat and Oddity, McCarthy toys with a bit of the unknown – which I feel like is the only way to really land some more lasting scares – but then makes some choices to almost purposefully ground those unknowns. I think that portends something really exciting for the future, if he can find the right tweak in tone, but for right now it levels the movies at “good” they’re not quite part of the enduring canon yet.