Oddity: cursed objects serve up the jump scares in this claustrophobic supernatural horror

Every horror movie needs a gimmick: Oddity has enough for an entire mini-series. The pleasure of Irish-writer-director Damian McCarthy’s film lies in its brazen stockpiling of images and ideas borrowed from other genre efforts, to the point that it feels like a kind of cabinet of curiosities – i.e. exactly the sort of thing that its heroine, Darcy (Carolyn Bracken) would sell in her eerie little small-town antique store. Darcy, who is blind, is good at keeping track of her inventory; she not only knows where everything is at all times, but also which items are supposedly cursed, and by whom.

As it turns out, one of Darcy’s prized possessions (inherited from her parents) plays a major role in Oddity’s narrative, which parcels out its information with a welcome and judicious sense of patience. Darcy, it seems, is not only a self-styled psychic (one whose abilities are predicated on touching significant objects), she’s also the twin sister of a woman who was allegedly murdered in her isolated country home by a patient who had escaped from a mental-health unit (a crime depicted, albeit obliquely, in the film’s prologue). 

In a strange and not at all worrisome coincidence, the victim’s husband happened to be the accused’s supervising physician. Cut to the present, where the grieving doctor, Ted (Gwilym Lee) has started over with little interest in reconnecting with his former sister-in-law, none of which stops Darcy from showing up at the aforementioned estate with a mysterious trunk and a surprise plan to spend the night. But first, she needs to get unpacked. 

What’s in the box? Anyone who has seen the trailer – or even the poster – for Oddity already knows that it’s a grotesquely designed, life-sized mannequin with a faced contorted into a Munch-like scream of anguish; it’s hard to call this information a spoiler when it’s also a selling point. The question of exactly what this wooden effigy really is and what, if anything, it’s capable of beyond sitting around looking creepy is not worth going into here. Suffice it to say that our guy has enough of a malign presence that the fearful performances of the actors around it – especially Caroline Menton as Ted’s rightfully sceptical girlfriend, who ends up grudgingly playing hostess for Darcy – feel credible. 

Ambience is everything in a movie like this, and McCarthy’s frames are nicely pressurised even when nothing explicitly threatening is going on. The jump scares, when they inevitably come, are handled just the right ratio of shamelessness to skill. In terms of visual style and narrative economy, Oddity has plenty to recommend, but for all its carefully engineered (and admirably nasty) revelations and satisfactions, it’s almost too self-contained for its own good. The best horror movies don’t just hold our attention, but also leave some kind of residue; for all its satisfying climactic gore, Oddity is finally a little dry.

► Oddity will be available to stream on Shudder from 27 September.