Frights and Feelings: Oddity (2024)

“Oddity” is a chilling gothic tale of supernatural revenge and an emotionally charged narrative of love, loss, and righteous fury.

Damian Mc Carthy’s 2024 stunner Oddity hits all the right notes. It’s a supernatural gothic barn burner anchored by a fantastic double lead performance by Carolyn Bracken as twin sisters Darcy and Dani Odello.

The film opens with Dani working on renovations for the new home she shares with her psychiatrist husband, Ted Timmis (Gwilym Lee). Dani’s idyllic dream home turns into a house of horrors when Olin Boole (Tadgh Murphy), a former patient of her husband, shows up and tells Dani that a man is in the house with her. Later that night, Dani is brutally murdered.

Fast forward to a year later, Darcy, Dani’s blind medium twin sister, plans on solving the mystery once and for all and enacting some much-deserved vengeance.

At the core of Oddity, there is a story about sibling bonds and love. Darcy’s devotion to her sister is palpable and becomes the lifeblood of the film’s entire plot. Essentially, it’s a love story, just not the romantic kind, and it’s better for it.

The depths and breadth of human emotion, especially love, should be explored across all kinds of relationships, and Mc Carthy manages to do this and creep out the audience at the same time.

Darcy herself is the titular Oddity, or at least that is what I have come to believe.

She runs an oddities shop, but her innate peculiarity is unnerving to those around her, including her brother-in-law Ted and his new romantic plaything Yana (Caroline Menton). However, Darcy moves through the narrative purposefully, feeling like an old friend to the audience. She’s automatically endearing in her authenticity.

Her sister Dani is in stark contrast to her sister but not quite what one would call a narrative foil.

Dani and Darcy are two sides of the same coin, so to speak. Their relationship has its strains. Darcy’s fierce independence despite dealing with health issues—both mental and physical—has caused the sisters some contention, but the care and compassion they have for one another are there. All relationships have complications, and sibling bonds can be some of the most intricate or volatile.

The nature of revenge in its connection to the sibling relationship is explored throughout the film.

Darcy is determined to discover the truth behind her sister’s death, even at the cost of her own life. When we meet Darcy, she’s a bit of a loose canon in how she works in the plot. You aren’t sure what she will do. In fact, her first appearance is when Ted brings her a recently deceased Olin Boole’s artificial eye for her to perform psychometry on.

Ted doesn’t believe in any of this, so naturally, he indulges his sister-in-law’s whims—a big mistake on his part.

The audience has an inkling that Ted has had a hand in his wife’s murder.

After all, in real life, it’s not entirely uncommon for women to be murdered by an intimate partner.

To put this into perspective, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that here in the States, in 2021, around 34% of female murder victims were murdered by an intimate partner. This is staggering in comparison to the percentage of male murder victims killed by intimate partners—which rests at only 6%.

In director Damien Mc Carthy’s native Ireland, murder has fallen over time. Yet, the majority of those murders as reported by Women’s Aid (a whopping 52% in total) had domestic abuse as a motivation. Not to mention all the violent murders since 1996 in the Republic of Ireland, 55% of the women murdered were killed by an intimate partner or ex.

Women dying at the hands of people they trust isn’t relegated simply to one country; this is a universal problem, one that deserves global attention to combat.

Ted is shady—and that’s at best. The smarmy and self-important doctor abuses his power at his job and, in the end, uses that to kill Dani. However, it’s Ted’s smug sense of self-importance that will strike a chord with the viewer in the most insidious way. Anyone who has been dealt trauma at the hands of self-important people will be left reeling.

There’s a rage simmering beneath Oddity‘s surface, and the rage holds special contempt for Ted and men like him.

After leaving the theatre, I praised Mc Carthy for his depictions of feminine rage because they feel genuine and are not ill-conceived cash grabs by a man looking to capitalize on feminism.

(Take note, men who want to make female-centric movies. If you cannot rise to the occasion of the craft and imbue the film with empathy and altruism like Mc Carthy in this film—don’t do it at all.)

Ted’s an all too real evil, one that ruins people’s lives because his happiness and comfort should come first. He presupposes that he is doing Dani a favor by contracting one of his orderlies—Ivan (Steve Wall)—to kill her. After all, he thinks Dani loves him too much and would never be able to live without him. She’s better off dead.

These revelations are not particularly shocking because they are so rooted in reality, but they are no less stomach-churning and rage-inducing.

Ted’s entitlement to Dani’s love and, ultimately, her life is a facet of the film that sticks with me.

His framing of Dani’s demise as a mercy to Ivan in a flashback is a scene far more disgusting than any eerie wooden doll. Darcy has no issue calling Ted on his fallacy, telling him that Dani would have been okay without him. After all, Dani would have had Darcy and eventually healed from her wounds. Darcy brands Ted the repulsive coward he is.

However, the heart of this film remains sororal love and devotion.

Dani and Darcy had their issues and quibbles, but that never stopped them from loving and caring for one another. Darcy’s drive to uncover the truth and right wrongs becomes the film’s emotional backbone. Darcy is our heroine, not perfect, but someone who loves and loves fiercely. In a world with little justice and empathy, characters like Darcy are needed more than ever.

We need messy characters who bear raw wounds and show the world their ills; characters stuck in vicious microcosms that actually represent the ugliest of macrocosms.

Carolyn Bracken plays the roles of both sisters with the verve needed to get the message across. No woman’s righteous rage could ever be uglier or more twisted than the machinations of an entitled man.

I’ll never say that Oddity is for everyone. It’s some heavy subject matter wrapped in a fantastically creepy gothic package. There is a deep sadness to this film, but it is a satisfying take on the concept of revenge. Happy endings will not be found here; however, justice will be served in one way or another.

Mc Carthy crafts an intelligent, visually striking film rife with sheer emotional gravity and force—catharsis can be found in the darkest of places.