Oddity (2024)

Oddity is a stylish, low-key horror exercise that mixes up a dash of folk horror with a notably impressive performance by Carolyn Bracken as identical twins. They are so distinct it’s hard to know they’re even sisters, let alone twins, let alone the same person. One, Dani Timmins, was married to the night physician at a nearby mental institution in the country, Dr. Ted Timmins (Gwilym Lee). Early in the movie she is brutally murdered one night by an escaped lunatic while Timmins is at work, the work of the one-eyed Olin Boole (Tadgh Murphy), subject of a 2013 short by director and writer Damian McCarthy. The other, Darcy Odello, is a witchy self-proclaimed psychic who is blind and does not believe that Boole killed her sister. Darcy’s specialty is reading objects, preferably personal items like rings and watches that have touched the skin of the people about whom she draws information. She runs an antique shop that sells only cursed items (one is the toy monkey used by Stephen King in his story “The Monkey”). It’s no place for shoplifters. The curses are removed only with legitimate purchases. Sometimes, she says, customers return with purloined items, begging her to take them back. Within a year of his wife’s death Dr. Timmins is already living with another woman, a woman he works with and knew before the murder. Darcy does not like this development and inserts herself into the life of Dr. Timmins and his new gal, Yana (Caroline Menton). She shows up at their spooky weird mansion with a gift: a wooden life-size statue of a man that is grotesque and horrific. This is basically the folk horror element, drawn, says McCarthy, from Jewish lore about golems. Oddity is unlikely to send anyone into paroxysms of terror but it has its share of jump scares, which are not entirely cheap, and a pervasive air of dread. Bracken modulates her performance—Darcy is generally meek and mild, but there’s a great deal going on underneath that and it peers out effectively. She can be quite unexpectedly fierce and commanding. The last image is almost perfect, set up across the length of the movie and presented slowly, quietly, playing with our expectations—and then delivering.