This deft Irish supernatural horror-cum-clairvoyant detective story delivers heavy frisson with minimal means: little more than the creepy recesses of a Grand Designs-style fixer-upper, a lifesize ventriloquist’s dummy howling to the furies, and some stringent performances. Also featuring occasional cutaways to a psychiatric hospital, it pays fealty to the gothic tradition, but is reminiscent of J-horror too in its antsy focus on an atmosphere of liminality that threatens to coalesce into something malevolent.
Squatting inside the country pile she is renovating with her husband Ted (Gwilym Lee), who runs the local mental asylum, Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is confronted with one of his patients at her door one night. Despite his glass eye, the man claims to have spotted a shady interloper slip into the house behind her – and demands to be let in. A year later, it turns out Dani was bludgeoned to death, leaving her blind twin sister Darcy (Bracken again) wanting to know more. So she invites herself to the same house Ted now shares with his new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton) – but not before sending them a trunk containing a gift from her curiosity shop: the aforementioned mannequin from hell.
Bracken excels in the paired roles, ostentatiously otherworldly as a white-haired, cream-clad clairvoyant where her sibling is totally normal. If one doppelganger wasn’t enough, Darcy – with her unblinking eyes and lack of niceties – also freakishly echoes the inanimate figure slumped in a chair. Not only does writer director Damian McCarthy handle these gothic effects sensitively, he also has a nice line in conversational scenes that ramp up tension and often end in Tarantinoesque whiplash. “Do I look stupid?” Yana replies to Darcy’s inquiry about whether she would let an unhinged man into the house. “I have no idea what you look like,” says Darcy. “But you sound stupid.”
With the omnipresent mannequin and the eruptions of Dani’s revenant in the house, Oddity could have easily ended up a hollow genre exercise. But McCarthy manages to invest each twist with a substance that feels distinctively Irish and Catholic: namely, an interest in moral retribution and self-damnation. This carefully controlled and pointedly shot film takes a hoary old set of staples and cobbles together something admirably original.
• Oddity is on digital platforms from 6 January.
