Much of Oddity plays out in the entryway of a country estate. This is a liminal space — a threshold between life and death — wherein a narrow foyer with stairs to either side is the main stage of the movie. The movie begins with a trick to set the scene: a woman goes out to her car and comes back inside. A man comes to the door, with buggy and different colored and shaped eyes. Someone came in while you stepped out, he says. Should she open the door for this strange man who readily reveals he knows too much about her, or risk what stands inside? She dies, either way.
And so begins Damian Mc Carthy’s greatly enjoyable Oddity, a hidden gem of a horror movie that plays like a Tales from the Crypt (1989-1996) episode in long form. The story revolves around the aforementioned woman’s widower, his new lover, and the woman’s psychic and blind sister, who makes an unexpected visit to the front halls of the home, bringing some creepy items from her curiosity shop with her.
The horror is stirring because it understands how to build suspense through context of space. From the front atrium, the blind woman sits and muses, stays still, and conjures spirits. What happened here? She can see something others can not. And she’s brought a grotesque wooden doll which keeps her company. There they sit, in the threshold of this space between life and death, and they will expose the truth.
This setup carries the gravity of suspense fairly well. It’s a smart construction. Damien Mc Carthy directs with economy. As a cabinet of curiosities enters this hall of judgement, we always know where our characters are in relation to one another and this space. They are brought forward as though this passage were a spiritual court and they are now put on a trial of the soul. The suspense is cooked up by anticipation and perhaps it never reaches any broad climactic moment, but it has many small victories in its fluent direction and vision for why horror works and how to play within the sandbox of an enclosed space to direct the audience and make them feel the horror.
Oddity is a delightful curio itself, an object enriched with deeply spirited material. The film moves with confidence and is perfectly right-sized, there is no room for error and it doesn’t waste any time. This is the fun kind of horror that looks beyond tropes and finds its own fun in psychic invention. We enter through the liminal spaces of the entryway and find some dark surprises around every corner. Riveting, smartly built, and aware of its storytelling dimensions, Oddity is just the peculiar kind of surprise that makes horror the best place to discover new ideas.