
The oddities will set us free
dir: Damian McCarthy
2024
Oddity is one of the stronger horror flicks to come out this year thus far. It’s still pretty slow, though, and deliberately unsatisfying in its resolution, so take my endorsement with a large grain of slow-cooked salt.
Not that you’re waiting for my blessing as to whether you’ll see this or not.
This is a complex and unsettling slow burner that nonetheless is happy enough to indulge in jump scares when it wants to punctuate something, and punctuate it does. Ye gods. I never pretended to be immune to jump scares, but the mark of a quality one is that even when you know it’s coming, it still scares the shit out of you.
This film also is an indictment of the insidiousness of how Grand Designs has permeated everything.
I have nothing against Kevin McCloud, in fact I quite like the man, as a presenter and as a designer, but there’s no doubt his terrible and terribly addictive show has done more to stoke the fires of property renovation - aspiration than any other show produced by Great Britain ever in its history. It is a horrible show where couples who claim they can’t afford any of what they’re doing somehow find the extra five hundred thousand pounds from somewhere in order to eventually complete their dream home five years later than they thought they would. It is dismal and irritating how well they manage to suck the audience in and get them invested in the works being completed without losing everything (which never happens, because the show is aspirational, after all).
Sometimes the couple’s survive, sometimes they don’t. A lot of them look like they’ve never really appreciated what the ‘sunk cost’ fallacy actually means, or, because they are so goddamn wealthy it doesn’t ultimately matter that much to them. It’s more than just a collection of stones and wood, because, in the man’s own words, “the notion of home is not simply a concept, it’s a place of psychological dependency.”
Rarely does it lead to murder, like it ultimately does here.
This is a very strange flick that walks down two paths that intertwine; that of a horrible murder that occurs in the ancient farmhouse being renovated that I mentioned earlier, and that of the sister of the victim seeking supernatural vengeance. The person who seems to stride between these two paths oblivious is, you could argue, the main character (he’s not, really), the husband of the woman who was murdered.
That husband is a psychiatrist at a mental institution. It does not matter what the character’s name is. He is played by Gwilym Lee, who you might know from stuff like Midsommer Murders or the Australian flick Top End Wedding. But probably his most famous role, I would argue, was playing astrophysics super genius and guitar god Brian May in the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.
When you see him in something like this, you realise just how much work those wigs were doing to get his character across. Without the wig, he’s just a slim, weasel-faced guy. Who better to play a dull psychiatrist who hews solely to the side of science over everything else?
In a different flick the conflict between the scientific method and the supernatural world would be a conflict between a “good” character and maybe a “bad” character who was trying to manipulate someone else through their superstitious beliefs. As in, The Crucible only works if witches don’t exist. It’s not bearing false witness or a witch hunt if they’re actually witches.
But this flick elegantly points to something terrible having happened in the ‘real’ world, for which, because of reasons, the justice for which will only be found through the supernatural. That the universe maybe solves its own problem, using all the terrible tools at its disposal.
We saw the poor woman attacked initially, and then we spend time with her twin sister (Carolyn Bracken plays both), as she tries to figure out, a year after her sister’s brutal death, what the fuck actually happened. We only watched the initial preamble, which had a one-eyed guy approach the terrible, cramped and cold house, and urge the woman inside to both let him in and to be careful because Someone Else snuck in to the house when she wasn’t looking.
The guy at the door doesn’t inspire confidence. He’s Irish, for one (it’s set in Ireland, all of them are Irish except Gwilym Lee, who’s Welsh, not that it matters), but he also has a ‘glass’ eye; pale, opaque, a rudimentary eye drawn on only with a texta. And he’s from the institution the woman’s husband works at.
That’s so creepy. We know something bad is about to happen, but is it him? Is he responsible? Is he the one, just because he’s got one eye, long hair and he’s Irish?
Everyone else thought so, including whoever or whatever killed him by exploding his head all across a floor like some lazy piñata.
For whatever reason the husband gets the glass eye, and takes it to the sister, in checking up on her. What a polite and helpful chap.
Dearest sister, Darcy, is blind. She is blind, but she is, at least according to herself, powerful. She runs an oddity shop, from which I guess we get the title, but her real bread and butter is being able to ‘read’ objects. Psychometry, I think that’s what it’s called.
She can touch the wedding ring of an unfaithful man and know his whole history, his whole filthy sordid history. We’re not in any doubt that it must be true, at least for the purposes of the film. She knows. She knows exactly who did what and why.
So, for her purposes, there is no mystery. She knows, at an early point, exactly what happened, but she wants to take her sweet time about it, in terms of getting revenge.
She pays an unwanted visit to the cursed farmhouse, and spends awkward time with the husband’s new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton). But she hasn’t come empty handed. She’s brought a heavy wooden case that has a horrific wooden golem inside.
Like, there is a logic to this flick that doesn’t exist in the real world. Most of us would think “there’s no reason that people would be cool with any of this happening”, or that people would be polite when they could kick up a stink. But the film barrels along with its own logic, and sells it really well, despite and because of how unnatural everything feels.
The place itself is not that impressive. It’s not a gloomy, gothic looking place. If anything it looks spartan but functionally mundane, but everything is shot such that despite how large the place might be (or looks it from the outside), it’s filmed in such a way as to be incredibly cramped and claustrophobic.
It makes us feel cramped and claustrophobic, in addition to all the creepy goings-on, and that’s not even just all the stuff the creepy wooden mannequin thing does or does not do.
It’s really a thing of breathtaking ugliness. And it always, always manages to be looking in the right direction as to maximise the discomfort of the viewer.
The flick seems, because of an early scene showing a trap door, because of a threat made of exposure, because of an admission, to be going towards a particular kind of resolution. Darcy wants to get a particular outcome for those responsible. She figures out that, in her pursuit of vengeance, she has fucked up royally. But she still has the means and the will to exact a terrible toll on those responsible for her sister’s death.
But the logical man of science has other plans. And it all comes down to property values, in the end, as being the great motivator.
There are some terrible, terrible people in this flick, and they’re not the ones you expect, necessarily.
And then there’s also the ending, the very end. Some people, as in some reviewers I’ve read think it’s the perfect ending, the very last shot being ‘perfect’, in what it implies. I am not one of those people. I think the ending is predictable, even if it holds out some final hope that justice will be served, but it’s also not as clever as it thinks. I rolled my eyes when I saw it, even as it fits in nicely with the rest of the flick.
It’s a carefully crafted, carefully paced horror flick, fairly unconventional and unfamiliar even as it makes inexorable sense as it rolls along. It does not feel like every other horror flick that's come out. The performances are perfect for the material, and the grim atmosphere created is sustained and intensified as the flick sees fit. Dread permeates almost everything to do with that building, and I do remember thinking towards the end that Kevin McCloud was going to turn up and say “It seems like you done fucked up on that kitchen redesign, oh, and with resorting to murder”, but instead comeuppance comes from a different direction.
Oddity. I don’t advise you watching it alone.
8 times if only wooden golems could go after all our enemies out of 10
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“As I’ve always believed, there’s nothing that can’t be explained.” – that won’t save you, arsehole, - Oddity
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