Sets and props. That’s all you need. Damian McCarthy clearly didn’t have a big budget to make Oddity. But necessity is the mother of invention: he found the three sets he needed, and a cavalcade of trinkets big and large to scare the hell out of everyone. So shame on productions like The Nun films, or those bloated exorcism movies: stop phoning your scares in, and give people like Damian, Arkasha Stevenson, as Osgood Perkins more money because they know what they’re doing with it when they have it.
After a chilling opening, we learn that poor Dani (Carolyn Bracken) has passed away from the horrifying home invasion by Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy), one of Dani’s husband Tim’s (Gwilym Lee) patients at his mental treatment facility. A year later, Tim visits Dani’s blind twin sister Darcy (also Bracken) in her antiques shop, casually inviting Darcy to spend the night in the house Tim still owns where his wife died. Darcy arrives that night, surprising Tim and his new fiance Yana (Caroline Menton)…with a large boxed present in tow.
Damian McCarthy only needs 3 sets to make Oddity work. Psych hospitals are inherently creepy, so that was an easy uneasing of the audience. Darcy’s antiques store is basically the Warren’s house in The Conjuring. Each new items appears more sinister than the next, especially after Darcy’s explanation of what happens when people steal from her, and when we see what “special” items are in her back room storage. But most of the film is set in Tim’s giant house. We see it over two time periods: the opening/flashback with Dani, and present day with Darcy and Yana stuck together. The Dani sequences set the stage for this peculiar house setup, with a windy behind brick wall staircase, and an open trap door at the top for some bizarre reason, hiding darkened passages into even greyer darker rooms. No wonder Tim complains about sinking his money into this pit of an investment, what an unwelcoming place! That initial setup sets the stage for present day, as McCarthy uses every inch of that house to it’s full potential. We get the dark room jump scares, the sinister walks up staircases, someone upstairs being creeped out by something downstairs, a scene inside a tent inside the house, bathroom light flickering, you name it, McCarthy’s got it. Who knew one relatively tiny house with one bathroom, 2 bedrooms, and barely two floors could be so versatile to craft an entire movie inside of it.
It helps that McCarthy had a great prop designer to fill the place. The antiquities shop is horror heaven: filled with every type of binded object you can think of, including the most sinister bellboy bell you’ve ever seen. As you also might have guessed, Darcy’s “present” to Tim and Yana in the big box is more of a present for Darcy, from her store. Yana’s investigation of it will conjure all sorts of icky thoughts as to what in the world this thing is here for. It’s super creepy, and acts almost as a fulcrum the movie revolves around. It stays, but the perspective constantly shifts around it, with new people interacting with it in different ways. We’ve also got a deeply unsettling camera that takes pictures automatically every few seconds. Gee, I wonder what’s gonna show up on those pics? As much fear as I got from the antiquities store, I think I was most scared everytime that camera took a picture, because of that unsettling rhythmic noise we hear that gives a mini jump stare each time it goes off.
Execution is greater than budget. Oddity proves that, over and over again. Also, I’ve never been happier to live in a city. The worst things happen when someone thinks its “rustic” to buy a house in the middle of nowhere. Um, what? That’s just cray cray.