Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: ODDITY [South By Southwest Film Festival 2024 - Austin, Texas]
The consequence of action or at least intent is based in creating an equal response. With "Oddity" [Midnighter], director Damian McCarthy returns with his sophomore outing which creates a mystery out of the unknown. Gwilyn Lee plays Ted, a doctor at an unnamed mental asylum whose has a mysterious event happen to his wife. Some time later, he comes back into contact with her twin sister Darcy (Carole Bracken plays both women) who is blind from birth but has the connection to the occult through her deceased mother. Darcy runs an antique shop where everything, she says, has a curse on it. What the film does is move between the logical and extraordinary. It plays with the notion of the other but also provides a rational explanation of what is going on. The structure of the movie splits at time but McCarthy keeps the progression very clear. He doesn't tease his audience but he does bait them at certain points. The takeaway being that normal human behavior can be as odd as anything one can imagine.
That said, the house the film takes place in does seem to have some kind of energy to it though that element is never described (though it is shown in a variety of subtle and yet precise ways). There are elements that could have been gone further into but McCarthy just keeps it out of reach. Even Darcy's approach to the new girlfriend, the questions but also smaller elements are more prodding than proactive. The use of the camera as a logical capture point and a motif is well played as is a scene when one of the characters prods a unique gift which the audience knows is anything but inert. The eventual playout is well crafted and does use foreshadowing without spoon feeding the audience too much. Lee plays Ted very proper with a side of skeevishness while Bracken as Darcy (as contrasted with the wife) is eerie and cold but with a seething amount of intelligence breaking through despite something not quite right going on (though a rational explantation is provided for that too). "Oddity" is efficiency of horror stoirytellin without overt bloodletting or sacrifixe of style making it both effective while still being digestable. B+
By Tim Wassberg
