The Scare Salon

Seriously, if you love a creepy, old-fashioned ghost story vibe mixed with a sort of morality/revenge tale, then Oddity should be high up on your to-watch list; it’s terrific and has genuinely scary moments and a wonderful sense of pervasive dread.

As I usually mention in my movie discussions, I strongly suggest you go into Oddity with as little foreknowledge as possible; that said, I will be talking about the plot in a fair amount of detail here, though I won’t be spoiling the ending or any big twists. Obviously, if you’d rather know nothing about the movie, please go watch it and come back here afterward. This is your final warning.

The first ten minutes of the story sucked me right in and are absolutely a master class in building tension. We’re following Dani (Carolyn Bracken), who is in the midst of renovating an old stone house way out in the Irish countryside. The place has no electricity, heat, or running water, and only has a cell signal in one specific spot on the stair landing, but Dani doesn’t seem to mind, and has been camping out in the cavernously empty living room in a yellow pup tent while she works on fixing the place up.

At some stage, she calls her husband, Dr. Ted Timms (Gwilym Lee), a psychiatrist at a hospital for the criminally insane. He’s been working night shifts and staying back at their place in the city, while she’s been sleeping out at the house periodically as she works on it. She doesn’t seem particularly bothered by staying out at this old, isolated place by herself all night, and in fact has even taken to setting up her camera to take photos every couple of minutes, hoping she’ll catch an image of a ghost. So far she’s been disappointed.

One night, though, there’s an unexpected knock at the door. Dani apprehensively slides open the little hatch in the door to see who it is, and it turns out it’s an intensely twitchy, sketchy-looking man with long hair and one weird, white glass eye to go with his other, normal one. He asks Dani to let him in, but as any sane woman would, she tells him no fucking way, Jack. Like what the hell is this dude even doing all the way out here?

However, then this man tells her that while she was outside just now getting something out of her car, someone went into her house while her back was turned. She obviously doesn’t believe him, but then she thinks she hears a creak somewhere off in the darkened recesses of the house. Could the guy be telling the truth? Or is it a trick?

Well, we don’t find out just yet, because after the title drop, the movie jumps ahead a year. Dr. Ted is walking into a quaint little curio shop, where he’s greeted by a kinda spooky-looking woman who is the spitting image of his wife, except with bobbed, ice-white hair instead of Dani’s longer brown waves. This is Darcy (also played by Carolyn Bracken), Dani’s twin sister, who is blind and owns this store which is supposedly full of cursed items.

From their discussion, it becomes clear that Dani was indeed brutally murdered a year ago, on the night the weird guy showed up at her house. Dr. Ted tells Darcy that said weird guy, whose name was Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy), has died at the hospital where Ted works; Olin had been a patient of Dr. Ted’s who had been released only a week before Dani’s murder. Dr. Ted has brought Darcy his glass eye, since she told him she wanted it.

Here’s the thing, though: Ted tells Darcy that Olin died of a heart attack, but we as the viewer know that’s not true because there was a brief scene prior to this where we see Olin in his room at the hospital, and he’s attacked by some unseen thing that absolutely obliterates his head, leaving little gobbets of flesh all over the floor where his noggin used to be. Hmmmm.

Darcy suggests she and Ted get together at some point to talk about Dani, and Ted halfheartedly agrees to make plans, telling Darcy that maybe she can come out to visit “us” at the remote stone house. Darcy is all, who’s this “us,” motherfucker, and he somewhat sheepishly tells her that he’s already got a new girlfriend named Yana (Caroline Menton), a pharmaceutical rep who he met at work and whose friendship supposedly got him through the grief after his wife’s murder. Darcy is clearly hurt that Ted moved on from her sister so quickly but doesn’t make too big of a thing about it.

A week later, Ted and Yana are at the old house, which has now been completely renovated. Both of them are kinda shitheels to be honest; unpleasant and constantly arguing. Yana hates having to stay out at this old pile by herself at night while Ted is working the graveyard shift because she thinks it’s creepy; oh, and hello, his wife was also murdered there only a year before and what if there are more of Ted’s crazy patients running around out in the darkness? Ted, who clearly doesn’t give much of a shit, tells her she should just stay at their place in the city if it bothers her so much; after another doctor retires, he says, he’ll get back on the day shift and they can both live in the old house on a normal schedule. This seems to mollify Yana somewhat.

She also tells him that she found Dani’s camera and asks if he’d like to keep it because it has a bunch of photos of Ted and Dani together. He seems ambivalent about the situation but concedes that yeah, they should probably keep it somewhere. Yana also tells him that she took some photos with it, and in one of them, there’s a blurred face that looks like Dani peeking around a distant corner. He calls her crazy and says he gets enough of that ghostly bullshit from Darcy; he doesn’t need it from her too.

Oh, and Yana also tells Ted that Darcy sent them a big trunk that was recently delivered; she doesn’t know what’s in it because it’s padlocked. It’s just sitting there next to the dining room table.

Minutes afterward, Darcy herself shows up unannounced at the house. This was great because it’s never actually explained how she got there; she obviously didn’t drive herself because she’s blind (unless she can use The Force), but we don’t see the Uber that dropped her off or anything like that. She’s just suddenly there in the courtyard.

Ted and Yana are perplexed as to why she’s there, but Darcy says that Ted invited her. Which he kind of did, though they hadn’t made any concrete plans, and now was not a good time anyway, as Ted was just heading out to work and Yana had plans with her friends in the city. Darcy is all, “Oh well, I’m here now, and I’d like to stay if it’s all the same to you,” so even though Yana is giving Ted the stinkeye, Ted reluctantly agrees to let Darcy stay in the house by herself.

Darcy also opens the trunk for them, revealing an unsettling, life-size wooden man whose mouth is carved into a perpetual scream. She says that a witch gave it to her mother, and that now she’s bequeathing it to Ted and Yana, who very obviously do not want the horrid thing.

Ted leaves, and just as Yana is preparing to skedaddle (after Darcy cheekily asks her to make her some food before she goes), she discovers that she can’t find her goddamn car keys anywhere. She tears the house apart looking for them, but they’ve seemingly vanished into thin air. So now she’s stuck at the house with Darcy all night, a development she is very unhappy with.

The women start talking, though, and Darcy reveals that she is essentially psychic; her specialty is psychometry, where she can hold an object in her hands and tell you things about the person who owns it. Yana thinks she’s a nutcase, but Darcy shows her the glass eye that had belonged to Olin Boole, her sister’s convicted killer; Darcy had wanted it because she wanted to know what happened to her sister a year ago.

After Darcy falls asleep, Yana gets curious about the wooden man, who is no longer in the trunk but is now sitting upright at the table. She notices that he has five holes in the back of his head, and from these holes she pulls out all kinds of strange objects, including rolled-up photos of Dani and Darcy, a lock of Darcy’s hair, and a vial of blood. Darcy catches her and shouts emphatically at her to put that shit right back where it came from immediately.

From here, things get eerier and eerier as new revelations come to light, and supernatural events begin to become more prominent. Yana not only thinks she sees Dani’s ghost at one point, but she also swears that the wooden man changes positions when she isn’t looking.

Although the solution to the mystery isn’t terribly hard to figure out if you’re following along with the story, I didn’t mind one bit, as the atmosphere of this thing was so thick with dread and genuine suspense. There were a few jump scares, but they were very well-earned, and most of the creep factor of the piece came from the tense buildup of scenes, with characters peering back over their shoulders into darkened doorways and wondering if they saw something back there. The whole vibe of the thing was really unsettling, and I dug it a great deal; I got super invested in the unfolding story and the spooky, oppressive mood.

If you like fairly low-key ghost story narratives cross-bred with a bit of an EC Comics revenge sensibility, then check this one out; it’s genuinely disquieting, is beautifully shot and acted, and is perfectly paced over its 98 minutes. It’s easy to see why this has earned so many accolades since its release; it’s not doing anything revolutionary, but it’s doing a scary, original, well-executed slant on a classic style of horror story. Definitely recommended.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.