Oddity (2024)

The Irish horror film Oddity concerns itself with a blind medium named Darcy, her murdered twin, a life-sized wooden golem, and a call bell haunted by a dead bellhop. These are the film's preoccupations, and it holds to them with a monomania that borders on the devotional. Damian McCarthy has made a picture about grief and vengeance, but mostly about the exquisite mechanics of dread. The camera lingers on a chest in the corner. Something inside clangs its cymbals once. That is the whole business of the thing.

On the modern cultural ledger, the film files a blank page. Its cast is uniformly pale and its concerns are entirely domestic. The blindness of its protagonist is a narrative convenience, a way to make a house feel larger and more hostile, not an invitation to reflect on accessibility or the dignity of the disabled. The vengeance at its center is a sister's private fury, unburdened by any argument about patriarchy or power. There is a psychiatric hospital, a brutish orderly, and a cannibal set loose to tidy a loose end. None of it is offered as a comment on the treatment of the mentally ill. It is simply a grim room the plot needs to walk through.

The film wants nothing from us but our nerves, and it takes them cleanly. It won the audience award at South by Southwest, which suggests that rooms full of people still enjoy being frightened in the dark without being instructed on how to feel about it afterward. We can classify this as a low-yield specimen on every index of contemporary social consciousness, and the classification should be read as neither praise nor indictment. It is merely a description of a film that has other things on its mind, namely a wooden man who walks when you are not looking.