United Kingdom
2024 98 mins
OV English
“Brilliant, bespoke, and tightly entertaining… A richly imagined three-ring circus of genre concepts”
– Alison Foreman, INDIEWIRE “Really damn scary”
– Mary Beth McAndrews, DREAD CENTRAL “Genuinely and consistently unsettling… Has a cold, unpredictable aesthetic that makes it equally riveting and tense”
– Brian Tallerico, EBERT.COM Darcy (Carolyn Bracken,
YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER) is a blind medium blessed with genuine occult abilities. She runs an antique shop, secretly collecting haunted and cursed items. Through a chance encounter, Darcy begins to decipher terrible secrets about her twin sister’s unsolved murder. A murder once presumed to have been perpetrated by a patient from a nearby mental-health institution, who was soon afterwards himself found dead, his head crushed to pieces with only a glass eye remaining unscathed. With the otherworldly help of a nightmarish wooden mannequin, Darcy embarks on a fact-finding mission of supernatural retribution, opening doorways into pure horror.
Scary as hell and bursting at the seams with imaginative concepts and nerve-shredding jolts,
ODDITY is the astonishing sophomore feature from Irish maestro Damian McCarthy (
CAVEAT). Like a haunted house hall of mirrors crashing through a tense home-invasion thriller, the film is captivatingly told in a puzzle-out-of-sequence structure seemingly channeled directly from a fever dream. With breathtaking control, McCarthy conjures a bona fide symphony of dread through a darkly playful direction style that toys with the audience’s nerves like a wolf teasing prey. Bracken hits a multitude of knockouts in an unforgettable dual performance, complemented by a stellar cast that includes Gwilym Lee (
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY), Tadhg Murphy (
THE NORTHMAN), Steve Wall (
DUNE: PART 2) and newcomer Caroline Menton. Packed with ideas and armed with jet-black wit,
ODDITY will have you firmly on the edge of your seat. It will revisit you at the edge of your nightmares. –
Mitch Davis