Oddity had its Quebec première at the Fantasia International Film Festival, 4 August 2024
“If you’re thinking of stealing something, you should know that every item in here is cursed,” says Darcy Odello (Carolyn Bracken) to the customer who has just entered her basement shop – adding shrewdly, “Curses are lifted at the time of purchase.” Darcy runs Odello’s Oddities- Antiques & Collectibles, but has a more lucrative sideline using her powers of second sight to read individuals’ entire histories, even their most intimate secrets, from personal objects with which they have had contact. Yet for all her talents as a clairvoyant, Darcy is as blind as the medium in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), and has not even at first realised that she is in fact addressing her brother-in-law Dr Ted Timms (Gwilym Lee). Darcy’s sister Dani (also played by Bracken) was murdered a year previously, after a psychiatric patients of Ted’s, the one-eyed Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy), came calling to the remote country estate that Dani was refurbishing while her husband Ted was at work. Reinstitutionalised immediately afterwards, Olin himself was brutally murdered a little later – and Ted, now moved into the estate with his new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton), has managed to locate Olin’s missing glass eye, and brought it to Darcy at her request.
Writer/director Damian Mc Carthy is a filmmaker of strange, significant objects. His debut feature Caveat (2020) opened with a young woman carrying a terrifying toy bunny, and also prominently included a crossbow and an elaborate restraining device resembling an old diving suit. In his latest, Oddity, the protagonist is a collector of curiosities, with the mildly cursed ones – though cursed enough, as Darcy informs Ted, that those who pilfer them tend to bring them back – out on display in the shop, while more hazardous items (including a haunted desk bell, and, in one of several cameos hinting at a McCarthy universe, that familiar toy bunny) kept encased and secure in a back room – not unlike the ‘Occult Museum’ of real-life self-styled demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, as seen in Gary Dauberman’s Annabelle Comes Home (2019). Locked away not behind glass like the others, but in an old wood-and-iron strongbox, is Darcy’s most treasured – and dangerous – item, once gifted by a witch to Darcy’s mother for her fifth wedding anniversary, and now a hidden hand-me-down. Newly informed by Olin’s eye, and armed with the strongbox, Darcy will return to the haunted scene of the crime, with confrontation and vengeance on her mind, and a golem-like creature that has her back.
“Hey, guess what, we are connected,” were the words that had Dani left on her last voice mail to Darcy. Dani was referring to the tiny upstairs space in her new home where she had managed to find a phone signal, but her words also took in the weird, almost preternatural bond that exists between twins, and the different threads linking one strand to another, not always in predictable let alone rational ways, across this film’s narrative. For Oddity plays like a surreal psychic detective story, and while you may feel way ahead of Darcy in terms of whodunnit (even if supernatural means allow her to catch up fast), it is the peculiar nature of the film’s mechanics that make it such a twisted joy from start to finish.
Here, much as film breaks down reality into 24 frames per second, evidence too comes in snapshots of the house interior that Dani had set up her camera to take at regular intervals, or in the impressionistic yet accurate hand-drawn sketches of psychiatric patient Declan Barrett (Johnny French), while the grotesque wooden figure from the wooden chest seems, at least initially, only to move when out of sight and out of frame, as though, like one of the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who, evading altogether the scrutiny of ocular perception. For in this film, reality comes warped, and there are entities existing in the planes between it. Certainly DP Colm Hogan’s canted camera angles help complete this picture by making everything seem askew and off, as though the uncanny is always waiting in the shadows of this otherwise modernised old home.
What Oddity traces is a clash of epistemological outlooks, as Darcy’s absolute conviction about the paranormal is in conflict with the hard scepticism of Ted, a man of science and rationalism. Somewhere between these two poles sit the viewers, who must negotiate their own path between their dismissal of the fanciful and their suspension of disbelief, while remaining ever curious to see what will happen if they open that sealed box or push that forbidden button. For while we know that the horror we are seeing unfold is at some obvious, essential level a fiction, that knowledge still does not stop us watching with at least one eye closed. Mc Carthy’s film is genuinely creepy, with an atmosphere of constant tension and dread occasionally punctuated by some very effectively handled jump scares. It is also beautifully stylised and darkly comic – and when it rings its bell, those who like their genre inventive, mannered and eccentric will come running.
strap: Damian Mc Carthy’s paranormal murder mystery lives up to its title, as a psychic sister’s revenge comes outside the box
© Anton Bitel
