With Caveat, Damian McCarthy layered mystery upon mystery to create a haunting thriller about isolation. The Irish filmmaker’s latest, Oddity, follows a similarly twist-laden blueprint. The plot exudes a pulpy sense of escalation, defined by a collision of convoluted story threads that might, in lesser hands, have devolved into unintentional comedy.
After all, the central image of Oddity verges on the ludicrous: a horrible wooden mannequin planted at the head of a dinner table, mouth frozen in a silent scream. The ornament belongs to Darcy (Carolyn Bracken), the blind, silver-haired twin sister of Dani (also Bracken), who was murdered while renovating the very house that Darcy visits not long into the film. The apparent culprit was a mental patient, Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy), recently discharged from the asylum where Dani’s husband, Ted (Gwilym Lee), is a doctor. Ted wasn’t home during the incident, but he has since shacked up with Yana (Caroline Menton), a sales rep from work.
Darcy runs a shop of occult curiosities and believes that she’s psychic, which goes some of the way toward explaining the creepy mannequin. On the anniversary of her sister’s death, she visits Ted with her unspoken suspicions in tow—as well as the huge shipping crate housing the mannequin. Nobody witnesses her open the crate, yet there it soon sits, her gift to them.
It isn’t tough to figure out where Oddity is going, but McCarthy unveils each detail at a satisfyingly unhurried pace, with some tense interludes involving photos captured by a motion-activated digital camera and the contents of holes drilled into the mannequin’s skull. The storytelling hook here isn’t shock value so much as the clockwork of a complex machine, and the way so many of its pieces work toward a singular purpose is never less than atmospheric.
That approach again serves McCarthy well in crafting a twisted and creepy little potboiler. But it’s also hard not to be skeptical of how long the filmmaker can continue to function in such a mode. Oddity is looser and less disciplined in the end than Caveat, which itself wasn’t immune to stretches of needless explanation. Thanks to its expert staging, the film doesn’t lose much in the way of immediacy, but there’s a sense that if McCarthy isn’t careful, he’s going to spend so long setting up his dominos that no one will stick around to watch him knock them down.
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