SXSW Film Review: Oddity

As with most things in life, the most memorable horror films must risk being bad – take swings that won’t work with everyone in the audience – if they want to be great. Damian McCarthy’s Oddity passes this criteria with flying colors.

It’s been almost a year since the unexpected death of Dani Timmis (Carolyn Bracken), and her twin sister Darcy is still looking for closure. Thanks to the help of brother-in-law Tim Timmis (Gwilym Lee) and her family’s knowledge of the occult, Darcy is able to use a personal belonging of Dani’s killer to peer into her final night on earth. But when Darcy learns that not everything is as it would seem, she packs up a fearsome wooden sculpture and pays an unexpected visit to Tim and new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton). Over the course one terrible evening, Darcy will use her connection with the supernatural to bring her sister a modicum of justice.

In a genre still dominated by harrowing tales of loss, Oddity is the rare foray into horror and melodrama. There’s an element of exaggeration to everything in the film – in particular, the interplay between Bracken and Menton – that will make it both harder to like and easier to love. McCarthy’s script walks a fine line between the absurd and the grotesque, occasionally leaving the performers out on a limb to wrestle with the ambition of the tone. The best parallel for Oddity is an episode of Tales From the Crypt: unhappy marriages dialed up to eleven and a narrative that aims for some of the most straight-faced silliness this side of Barbarian.

But considering that the film is destined (and not unfairly) to be billed as a horror-comedy, what is most surprising about Oddity is how damn scary it manages to be. McCarthy perfectly understands both the potential and the limitations of this kind of narrative, and as a result, much of the film is an exercise in subverting expectations. Even when the script leans into a kind of exaggerated performance, McCarthy still takes his time setting the stage for a few standout scares – and even better, constructs each for maximum impact. Based on the reactions from this screening, there is at least one cutaway in the film that will rival Gore Verbinski’s The Ring for its chokehold on audience trauma.

If you are open to horror tinged with melodrama – if you find films like Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb to be more entertaining than the latest flavor of Hereditary clones – then you may just find yourself on the film’s very special wavelength. Oddity is often a terrifying film because of its absurdist streak, not despite it, and McCarthy and his cast swing for the fences without ever once losing their balance. In a genre where there are much safer paths to theatrical distribution, the fact that studios will still gamble on the weirder titles brings me no small amount of joy.

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Oddity

Midnighter, World Premiere

Sunday, March 10, 7pm & 7:30pm, Alamo South Lamar
Friday, March 15, 9:45pm, Alamo South Lamar

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