HFC at SXSW ‘24: The Oddity Review

There’s nothing quite like a horror movie that aims to scare you in a fun way. Notable examples of scary flicks that have this mission include Steve Miner’s House (1985), Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 (1987), and even the recent anthology horror series V/H/S (which first debuted in 2012). These sorts of films never really bother with trying to be about something more than what it says on the tin. There’s no deep metaphors for society and personal trauma here, just pure, uncut spooky happenings. For all of these movies, the plot usually can be boiled down to this: There’s spooky shit and there’s some people that run into said spooky shit. Rather than trying to  teach you anything, these horror films just want to scare the living daylights out of you. 

Oddity, making its World Premiere at South by Southwest (SXSW) this March, becomes a contemporary addition to that group of films whose sole goal is to give the audience some zapping frights. Throwing together a blind medium, a dark (yet chic) house, and an open-mouthed wooden man, Irish director and writer Damian McCarthy opens his frightening funhouse to the world. 

McCarthy gets things moving with a dread-inducing introduction that places a woman named Dany (Carolyn Bracken) alone in her new, barren house out in the middle of the forest. This scene acts as a microcosm of how the film will approach its scares throughout the rest of its sordid tale: dark rooms, loud creaking wooden floors, noises happening somewhere unseen, and the unsettling feeling of being stuck between two different terrors. All of these ingredients spell a deadly outcome for Dany, but McCarthy’s tale is just getting started. From there we meet Darcy (Bracken, in a dual role), Dany’s twin sister, and owner of an oddities shop that collects many sorts of alleged cursed objects. 

It’s been a year since Dany met her violent demise and Darcy still has questions. The main one being that she doesn’t really believe that her sister’s actual murderer has been brought to justice. However, while Darcy dwells over the true nature of her sister’s death, Dany’s husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) seems all too eager to move on from his wife’s passing, shacking up at the scene of the crime with new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton). In this first act, McCarthy spends the time to set up all these characters, initially posing Darcy as an impromptu murder investigator deadset on finding the truth to her sister’s fate.

However, McCarthy throws a small yet interesting tweak to this set up by pushing his characters’ darker intentions. Darcy, seemingly reserved yet determined in her first scenes, becomes more aggressive and filled with lust for revenge, while Ted is slowly revealed to be a bit worse than an average pompous asshole. It’s when these sides come out, and when Darcy shows up to Ted and Yana’s home with a human-sized gift, that Oddity begins to grab ahold of the suspense and use it to strangle the audience with tension.

Adding an extra powerful hand to the film’s suffocating thrills is the aforementioned man of wood, Darcy’s passive aggressive gift to Ted and his new flame. A marvel of simple yet terrifying design, this wooden mannequin haunts the rest of the film with its gaping roar and a penchant for turning its head when you least expect. With the attitude of a kid who found a scary doll who now looks to scare their younger siblings with it, McCarthy gets the bang for his buck by placing this scary SOB in nearly every frame.

While happy to hold the stick of fear in one hand, Oddity and its creator are just as happy to hold the stick of humor in its other hand. In the post-screening Q&A, McCarthy mentioned that he likes using comedy in his horror stories because it can bring “a sense of relief” before dropping back into scary stuff again. That makes sense, as McCarthy went on to note that Sam Raimi is one of his major inspirations. True to that claim, this is a film that could be visualized with a wave graph that oscillates between comedy and horror, at times combining the two at the same time, such as the film’s use of its spooky mannequin to act as both a harbinger of doom and a pestering figure of background scene comedy. It’s not a goofy sort of horror movie like Evil Dead 2, but McCarthy manages to snuggly fit some funny character burns or statements laced with cheeky irony in between the growing darkness.

Oddity is definitely a film that works best in a theater setting, as displayed by the numerous sounds of audience cackling and gasping and even the outburst of “Oh, Jesus fuck!” Like any good “straight to the point” horror movie, McCarthy lets everything out in the third act. We finally see the things that are bumping in the shadows (or sitting unsettlingly still at a table) and the murder mystery reveals its truths. The former is certainly pulled off better than the latter, mainly because McCarthy does such a good job setting up fake outs and supernatural hints. Once those start moving, the screams of the audience feel almost therapeutic. As for the solutions to the mystery? They’re not terrible, but they do feel a little cookie cutter (hint: the person who is revealed to be an asshole is more than likely to do asshole things). Then again, when it comes to horror movies striving to get the most scares out of an audience, an unoriginal (if somewhat overcomplicated) central murder mystery isn’t the worst thing to have connecting the scary parts together.

Ultimately playing out as a macabre fable about the pratfalls of being a conniving and deceitful asshole, Oddity ends on a sequence that fully brings its horror and comedy together. In this sequence, McCarthy mirrors the events to the beginning's unsettling vibe. There’s excruciating tension, followed by quick glimpses at empty or dark corners, and then, just as the audience is about to break their seats with tightening butts and fingers, the character at the center of it all meets their doom. However, with a mischievous grin, McCarthy ends the film with a shot that gets the audience to relieve screams and laughs in the same breath.

Oddity never reaches the wacky heights of McCarthy’s idol’s Evil Dead 2, but it does manage to avoid a lot of unnecessary metaphorical or story fluff to really let its scares and laughs breathe. And honestly, in a reality where a lot of things are overcomplicated, having a film like Oddity show the power of firm and terrifying simplicity is nice to have.