****/****
starring Gwilym Lee, Carolyn Bracken, Tadhg Murphy, Steve Wall
written and directed by Damian McCarthy
by Walter Chaw Damien McCarthy’s Oddity is the perfect campfire story: self-contained, tantalizingly high-concept, and terrifying as fuck without necessarily carrying any existential baggage or greater stakes than, “Hey, some fucked up things happened to these people once, gather ’round while I tell the tale of a night just like this.” It’s the kind of story I’d love to hear while camping on the moors–the kind of thing Harlan Ellison used to write in the front window of Dangerous Visions bookstore in Sherman Oaks as a parlour trick: give him a prompt and watch him go. In Oddity, the blind proprietress of a cursed oddities shop (curses removed upon purchase) seeks to discover the murderer of her twin sister. That’s it, the long and the short of it, but what McCarthy conjures from a one-sentence pitch is an exercise in unbearably ratcheting tension, with tremendous performances and impeccable filmmaking craft. Consider a prologue that, in the first minute, establishes the existence of a motion-activated camera documenting the movements of a lone woman in an isolated location. Its shutter clicks once when she crosses before it, and then again when nothing crosses before it. I mean “nothing” in the Goodnight Moon sense, the Wallace Stevens sense, where the camera captures a nothing we can see and a nothing we can’t. The woman leaves the relative security of her home twice, and both times, McCarthy offers us a point of view on her that isn’t attached to anything. She’s being watched, see, and it’s awful. The second time, at night, she makes it to safety, but before we can relax, the pitch-black outside tests the doorknob as soon as she locks it behind her. I thought of the scene in Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton’s The Leopard Man where a mother tarries in unlocking the door for her terrified daughter, who is given to crying wolf, and then the pleas stop, and a slow pool of blood begins to spread under the door.
Oddity has some lovely gore moments, though what works best about it is its command of implications. The blind proprietress is Darcy (Carolyn Bracken), who has the gift of being able to ken the story of objects simply by touching them. A year after the death of her sister, Dani (also Bracken), her brother-in-law, Ted (Gwilym Lee)–the head doctor at an insane asylum, of course–gifts Darcy with the glass eye of the man accused of murdering his wife, Darcy’s sister. He was killed while under Ted’s care, you see, and, well. Ted invites Darcy out to the place he and Dani were renovating at the time of her murder for dinner and to meet his new girlfriend, Yana (Carolyn Menton), with whom he works at the looney bin. That night, Darcy touches the glass eye, and because of what she sees, she decides that a most uncomfortable trip to the deep wood and wild might be just the ticket for a bit of sleuthing over a suddenly not-so-open-and-shut case. The setup, you’ll agree, is delicious. It has elements of a John Dickson Carr novel, one of his supernatural ones: very British, very formal, and as meticulous and clean as a Swiss clockwork. A week passes, and Yana, a classic EC Comics harridan, shows Ted a camera of Dani’s that she’s found. In the corner of one snapshot is an image resembling Dani lurking in the shadows. Ted doesn’t want to hear such poppycock. He’s the skeptic, the man who mistrusts intuition in Don’t Look Now scenarios where reason is akin to blindness. When Darcy appears the same day as the delivery of a giant oak box she’s sent ahead, taking Ted up on his dinner invitation, Ted tries to send her away, but Darcy is curiously cold and insistent about staying.
The last hour is spent learning more about what happened the night Dani was murdered, the contents of the giant oak box, and precisely what Darcy has in mind paying surprise visits to brothers-in-law who should be grieving more and their new, jealous girlfriends who have a nasty streak so obvious and wide it’s easy to judge their mate’s character uncharitably, too. A few things happen in Oddity that made me swear out loud. Not from surprise, but rather the sort of profanity used as a ward against an inevitable calamity freshly discovered–the “oh, fuck” that comes from recognizing, too late, that the fuse you saw being lit a few minutes ago leads to a stack of gunpowder under your seat. Hitchcock’s oft-referenced illustration of the difference between shock and tension is invoked herein with slight adjustments: What if the timebomb hidden under the table between two men having a conversation is now sitting at the table in its own chair, but one of the men is blind, and the other doesn’t know what a bomb looks like? On the wall of Darcy’s shop is Goya’s painting of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga, called “The Red Boy.” Innocent on its surface, it is, like Norman Rockwell’s April Fools’ Day covers, crammed with insidious details. I wonder if the piece served as the inspiration for the movie’s approach. On the wall of the place where most of Oddity takes place, after all, is a large print of a Rorschach blot–the one that looks like a bat, or how my mother never loved me. You see what you have to see. On the night Dani is murdered, count the different types of vision she uses and how useless they all prove in saving her life.
Oddity is like Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave or Jules Dassin’s Rififi: a tight, contained little monster that offers an unusually satisfying burst of cathartic energy. Ryan Spindell’s short films do this, too, specializing in astonishing payoffs in a world where, most of the time, what’s fumbled is the landing. There is a sequence of discovery here in which one character takes a long pair of tweezers to a series of boreholes that made me extremely uncomfortable; a jump-scare that rivals the last great one, the camcorder scene in The Descent; and a wry final shot that points to the possibility of further entries in McCarthy’s slowly-expanding universe of haunted objects. There are a dozen lit, showcase cubbies in Darcy’s private backroom, in fact, playing host to a jack-in-the-box, a reel-to-reel recording, a porcelain cat, a framed photograph, a hookah lamp, and the bunny from McCarthy’s first film, Caveat. (I thought I even spotted a Stephen King cymbal monkey.) This sent me down the rabbit hole of visiting McCarthy’s celebrated short films, which not only confirmed that a few of these doodads do, indeed, make their first appearances there but also revealed where McCarthy honed his skill for extending pregnant moments, conjuring expensive-looking productions from a pittance, and crafting efficient locked-room melodramas. It seems that neither Caveat nor Oddity was an accident and that, for all their dread and terror, what lingers about McCarthy’s work is how it is, of all things, fun. I appreciate the long burners, the life-crushers, the you’ll-never-be-the-same-again boundaries-stretching extremities, but I gotta confess, I forgot how much I missed a good time.
