Critics reviews

Mc Carthy’s film is genuinely creepy, with an atmosphere of constant tension and dread occasionally punctuated by some very effectively handled jump scares. It is also beautifully stylised and darkly comic – and when it rings its bell, those who like their genre inventive, mannered and eccentric will come running.

No one makes movies like Damian McCarthy. Even in the creatively autonomous space of indie horror (where audiences in recent years especially have spurned the film industry’s cynical rehash/recycle business model in favour of original IP), McCarthy’s sophomore feature Oddity stretches “original” to its most exciting and jaw-dropping limits yet.

McCarthy understands the horror tropes intimately, but he uses them with freedom and freshness, lifting his films out of a specific genre. “Oddity” is a murder-mystery, a supernatural horror, and a home invasion thriller, all mixed together.

As he did with his stellar feature directorial debut, 2021's Caveat, McCarthy doesn't play by the cliched rules of horror... Atmospheric and unpredictable, Oddity is a rare treasure.

Joining a thriving cohort of Irish filmmakers working in horror or on its fringes, McCarthy has a cheeky sense of humor and a clear love for genre traditions. Colm Hogan’s photography is clean and calm, his God’s-eye shots rich with icy foreboding, while Aza Hand’s sound design is lush and at times almost bestial. These ensure an atmosphere that’s rarely less than creepy and occasionally jolting, helping us forgive the underwritten characters and vague jiggery-pokery.

At its most powerful, Mc Carthy’s work feels like looking into a mirror and seeing another face reflected back at you. His sophomore feature Oddity is full of such moments — not to mention the scariest cold open of the year so far.

Oddity is simultaneously an impressive production and a bizarre lesson in the vagaries of fear: without visibly shifting its tactics, it can be shiver-inducing in a few scenes and tedious in others.

Oddity is looser and less disciplined in the end than Caveat, which itself wasn’t immune to stretches of needless explanation. Thanks to its expert staging, the film doesn’t lose much in the way of immediacy, but there’s a sense that if McCarthy isn’t careful, he’s going to spend so long setting up his dominos that no one will stick around to watch him knock them down.

While the story at the heart of the second feature from Irish writer/director Damian McCarthy may be, despite the film’s occult trappings, fundamentally conventional on a narrative level, the director’s ability to conjure and maintain a genuinely unsettling atmosphere makes this Irish chiller one to watch for horror fans.

Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy deliberately jumbles the timeline of events in his effectively frightening and unexpectedly droll haunted-house horror.

“Oddity” delivers a brilliant, bespoke, and tightly entertaining string of ideas that work stronger as a collection — with even these missteps feeling like they branch from a unified center.