Hyperbole can be difficult to avoid when writing movie reviews, especially during the rush and excitement of a film festival, so it’s important to stay grounded and keep a sense of perspective. Not everything is a masterpiece. Unless you only watched one movie, every film can’t be the best one you saw at the festival. March is likely a little too early to declare something the film of the year. Keeping all that in mind, I still feel confident in saying that writer-director Damian Mc Carthy’s second feature film ODDITY, which just premiered at SXSW, cements him as a master of the haunted house film.
Mc Carthy’s feature debut CAVEAT was a terrifying examination of family secrets and supernatural mysteries. ODDITY continues down that path (even throwing in a quick nod to CAVEAT in the process), going deeper into Irish folk horror and showcasing Mc Carthy’s skill for deft characterization, keen understanding of horror conventions, expert use of camerawork, and surgical precision in delivering some of the best jump scares ever put on film. Mc Carthy is a filmmaker who understands horror on a molecular level, and his ghost stories exemplify the brilliant storytelling and hair-raising terror that you find in the best of the genre.
Ted (Gwilym Lee) is a doctor at a psychiatric hospital whose wife Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is brutally murdered while home alone at their remote country house. Her suspected killer is Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy), a patient of Ted’s who himself is murdered soon after Dani’s death. On the one-year anniversary of her death, Dani’s twin sister Darcy (also Bracken, in a fantastic dual performance) comes to visit Ted and his new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton) at that same country house where they now live together. Darcy comes bearing an unsettling gift for the new couple: a life-size wooden mannequin whose mouth is open in a perpetual scream. Darcy and the mannequin are both unwelcome visitors in the house, but Ted lets them stay anyway and heads off to work, leaving Yana to entertain them overnight as best she can.
The sequence leading up to Dani’s murder is a masterclass in suspense. She peers through a small opening in her front door at Olin, who stands outside and tells her that someone slipped inside the house when she wasn’t looking. Fearing that he’s lying in order to gain entry to the house, she makes him stay outside, but his desperate warnings and his eager agreement when she threatens to call the police make her doubt herself. It’s an incredible weaponization of confined perspective and inky darkness. Dani stands at the front door, staring out into the night at a strange man who comes bearing a dire warning, as she is surrounded on both sides by shadowy doorways bookending the massive entryway. The juxtaposition between the two possible threats — the one outside, where she sees only a tiny sliver of the visual field, and the one inside, where her vision is unobstructed but she is completely vulnerable to the potential home invader — makes for an unbearably tense horror setup that has left me sleeping with the lights on for the foreseeable future.
The house itself is just as much a character in ODDITY as the cast members are, a fact that becomes even more significant as the plot unfolds. (Between this film and CAVEAT, I could spend an hour talking to Mc Carthy about his use of cinematic space and his location scouting alone.) Ted and Dani are renovating, and while the agèd stone exterior belies the modern interior, it is still a cavernous, labyrinthine structure that underscores the twists and turns of the film’s mystery and allows for some truly great haunted house scares.
Jump scares are unfairly maligned. It takes an intelligent and sophisticated filmmaker to do them well. You have to understand audience expectations, you have to anticipate (and, crucially, maneuver) where the eye is going to go, and you have to time scenes to perfection. It’s not just about the payoff; the buildup is what makes a truly good jump scare. Mc Carthy, cinematographer Colm Hogan, and editor Brian Philip Davis know all of this, and they craft their jump scares impeccably, immersing you fully in this house of horrors as first Dani and later Yana contend with malevolent forces coming from inside their home.
Mc Carthy’s affinity for toying with horror conventions is especially interesting when it comes to Darcy. She runs an oddity shop and claims — much to Ted’s derision — to be psychic (or, more precisely, clairtangent; she can learn things about people by touching significant possessions of theirs). She is also blind. The “blind seer” trope is a common one in horror, often positioning a disabled person as a mystical (and therefore dehumanized) Other. What Mc Carthy and Bracken do with Darcy’s character is much more interesting and nuanced than that. Though she does have supernatural abilities, she is not alone in that, and many of her abilities of perception have much more mundane explanations: she is fiercely intelligent and focused, and much of her shrewdness comes simply from observing human behavior. If she is able to see more, perhaps it is because the people around her disregard her and write her off due to her blindness, enabling her to observe traits that they keep hidden from people they view as bigger threats, i.e., abled people.
Bracken’s dual performance anchors the film in a fascinating way. She is both the lost sister and the avenging sister, and that duality plays out in the other characters as well. Mc Carthy’s haunted house stories aren’t just about disembodied footsteps or ghostly faces emerging from the shadows. They’re also about power, cruelty, and greed; family, loyalty, and betrayal. His films are terrifying, masterful works of horror that find the darkness within humanity to be more frightening than the darkness that peers at us from beyond the veil. ODDITY is sly, scary, and impeccably crafted, and it confirms Damian Mc Carthy as one of the best filmmakers working in horror today.
Tags: Brian Philip Davis, Caroline Menton, Carolyn Bracken, Caveat, Colm Hogan, Damian Mc Carthy, Damian McCarthy, Film Festivals, Gwilym Lee, Oddity, SXSW, SXSW 2024, Tadgh Murphy
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