In the Flesh: Oddity

There’s a lot to be said for the quiet competence with which Damian McCarthy and his team make movies. No lazy shots, no serious goofs in the writing, good solid jump scares with adequate buildup and expert deployment. Oddity may pose few novel ideas, but its bona fides are there for anyone to see. It has a clear connection to both its genre and cinema as a whole, hearkening back to everything from The Strangers to Don’t Look Now, and if its creature design hews somewhat uneven, that literacy ensures its framing, color, pace, and editing hew close to the genre’s best instincts. Its sequences of suspense are taut, even as things shift into sustained horror with the animation of the wooden doll, the titular oddity, by the vengeful spirit of Dani Timmis’ twin sister, Darcy (both women are played by Carolyn Bracken). Watching (and listening to; the film’s Foley is a cut above) the construct ascend the stairs with measured, inexorable tread brings to mind Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen’s The Golem, the preoccupation of which with the emotional and spiritual weight of material things weighs heavily on the plot.

Darcy, who possesses psychometric powers of some sort, divines her path forward through touching the material possessions of the people around her. Her curio shop contains objects touched by the dead and cursed by their associations with violence and death. The house owned by Dr .Ted Timmis (Gwilym Lee) and his wife, Dani, is central to the murder mystery at the heart of the film, and Ted’s leaden response to Darcy’s horror at his having contracted the murder of his wife, her sister, rather than divorced her for the simple reason that he wanted to keep the house and thought, quite reasonably given his extramarital affair, that he was likely to lose it in the proceedings. There’s an obvious connection between his attitude toward possessions and his work as a supervising physician at an asylum for the violently insane. The people within the asylum’s bleak, fluorescent-lit halls are things to him, inert objects to be managed and ordered. His wife, another thing, and of less value than the house.

McCarthy’s script is solid, and with just enough nuance to keep its relative thinness of characterization from leading to tedium. Bracken is engaging in the dual role of the twin sisters, Lee disturbing in his inert silence and dead-eyed mildness of manner, but it’s Steve Wall as the menacing orderly, Ivan, who stands out among the cast. His vile equivocation on whether or not he’s going to rape Timmis’s wife is delivered in the same tone a man might use to debate where to sit in a movie theater, his downfall and eventual fate sold as much by his ravaged, expressive features as by the grisly material itself. The film doles out its scares at an accelerating pace that never feels overstuffed or compromised by density, and its last scene is delightfully tense and relatable, even slightly soured by another instance of unappealing creature design. After his previous film Caveat’s modest but robust pleasures, McCarthy has become a good bet for a nice, solid scare.