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Oddity
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Acorn Media Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (6th January 2025). |
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The Film
 While her psychiatrist husband Ted (Midsomer Murders' Gwilym Lee) works nights in a mental institution, Dani Timmis (You Are Not My Mother's Carolyn Bracken) spends her days renovating the medieval farmhouse they have purchased in the remote countryside. One night, one of Ted's patients Olin Boole (Boy Eats Girl's Tadhg Murphy) turns up on the doorstep urging Dani to let him inside, claiming that he saw someone else run inside while she went out to the car. Although unnerved by noises inside the large building, she is also too afraid to unlock the door to this stranger. A year later, we learn that Dani was murdered by Boole who himself was subsequently brutally murdered ostensibly by another patient while in custody. Although Ted has started a relationship with pharmaceutical representative Yana (Caroline Menton), he keeps his promise to Dani's blind twin sister Darci to provide her with something belonging to the killer (Boole's glass eye) since she has the psychic ability to read objects and runs a curio shop of cursed objects. Ted humors Darci, assuming her supposed abilities to be as much a way of coping with her blindness as well as a supposedly benign brain tumor. When she turns up on his doorstep for an impromptu visit with the gift of a life-sized wooden mannequin – an anniversary gift to her parents from a "witch" – Ted humors her when she wants to remain in the farmhouse while Ted goes to work and Yana heads to the city since she believes she has either seen evidence of Dani haunting the place or actually is seeing things because she does not like staying there alone at night. While Ted leaves, Yana is unable to find her keys and must remain with Darci and the wooden man while Darci asks probing questions about the duration of Yana's relationship with her former brother-in-law and makes the claim that Boole was not the killer but she was able to discover their real identity. Irish director Damian McCarthy's follow-up to his almost-DIY creative debut Caveat, Oddity is certainly a more assured effort in terms of visual style, technical proficiency, and performance. The farmhouse is even more of a character than the first film's island cottage, the contrasting lighting and production design of asylum and curio shop clutter and the spare farmhouse creates a sort of inversion of comforting and discomforting domestic spaces, and the Golem-like wooden man is shown off to good effect as an object. Lee and Bracken have brilliant moments – the final sequence completely belongs to the latter in the same manner as some of M.R. James' solitary protagonists – but both are hampered by the script's need to keep them ambiguous; whereas Menton and Steve Wall (Dune: Part II) as a creepy, possibly-red herring asylum orderly both have freer reign thanks to the same script mechanics. The mystery is reasonably-diverting for much of the film, but the reveal is a letdown, drawn out as it is by a number of flashbacks from more than one point-of-view, and the climax ultimately fails to effectively realize the wooden man's role in it. On the other hand, the coda is almost a short film in itself, effectively shot, edited, scored, sound-designed, and performed only to be let down by the final shot which is more humorous than creepy. Caveat's star Johnny French has a cameo as the halfway house resident who discovers Boole's body, as does that film's mechanical rabbit toy as one of Darci's cursed curios (based on this, one wonders if the hotel reception bell that bookends the film will make an appearance along with its backstory in a third McCarthy feature).
Video
Shot on the Sony CineAlta with vintage Canon FD 35mm SLR lenses, Oddity has a filmic softish in wide shots, particularly those of the misty rural exteriors while closer angles reveal the gritty texture of locations, sets, and the fine details of the latex-sculpted wooden man's facial and bodily features (perhaps too much so as when he does move he looks a rigid as his suspended animation form). Obviously shot flat and graded, the film makes wonderful use of deep blacks, flickering flourscents, and areas of select illumination to both chill and jolt the viewer. The disc appears to be identical to the U.S. release apart from the lack of region coding that makes this the more widely accessible edition.
Audio
The English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is deliberately spare so that the farmhouse noises in the rear channels could just as easily be settling and other atmosphere or signs of a presence. Music does much of the lifting work in terms of jump scares in the moments when McCarthy overplays his hand and telegraphs a jump before the camera pans back to reveal what was once there is changed. A 2.0 audio description track is included along with English SDH and French subtitles.
Extras
Extras are disappointingly stingy this time around including a storyboard-to-screen featurette (3:18) of one sequence, a talking-head behind the scenes (4:40) in which the actors must remain vague about the plot, and The making of the wooden mannequin gallery that speaks for itself.
Overall
Damian McCarthy's follow-up to his debut Caveat shows a leap in visual style and direction but also reveals that those are not really the areas in which he has to work to deliver something more than just a little creepy.
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