The cleverest thing in the new horror movie Oddity is when director Damian McCarthy places an object in the middle of the room and then largely doesn’t move it. And this is clever—by having this bizarre object constantly there, mostly static, it throws us off balance, making us far more susceptible to those parts of horror movies most of us are used to by now. The tension grows more tense and the jump scares make us jump just a little more as we lean forward, waiting for this potential energy to explode.
We open on an enormous, creepy house in the woods in Ireland, which is always a great place to start. Soon, a woman is murdered there, supposedly by a recently released inmate from a mental institution for criminals. The woman’s husband is a doctor at that institution, and a year after the killing he goes to visit the woman’s twin sister, a blind medium who owns a nearby curiosity shop. As it turns out, the suspected murderer was, himself, murdered, having his head smashed in, with the only thing remaining being his ghastly fake eye, which the doctor has procured and is now handing off to the psychic sister, who claims she can relive someone’s experiences by touching their possessions. Not long after, she shows up at the doctor’s creepy house with a large wooden chest and a few things on her mind.
McCarthy does a delightful job creating a kind of gothic, spooky tone with his brown and black and gray color palette and his flickering lights. And he handles that bizarre static object masterfully, with one scene in particular sure to have audience members actually yelling at the screen. That it all ends up playing out more or less the way we expect is a slight letdown, if only because all of the work he does beforehand raises the possibility of a much stranger conclusion, and it maybe even undermines that work. But that’s ultimately a small complaint about a fun, scary ghost story that makes one incredibly smart decision.
Oddity is in theaters July 19th.
