Oddity (2024)

Writer-director Damian Mc Carthy made a very impressive impact on horror fans with his first feature, Caveat, and now, there's no reason for me to keep my cards close to my chest here, he is two for two. Oddity is arguably a slight improvement, although it's a very close call, and I will be very happy indeed if Mc Carthy continues to make movies of this quality, and with this level of creepiness.

Things begin with a tense sequence that ends in murder, the victim being Dani (Carolyn Bracken), the wife of a psychiatrist named Ted (Gwilym Lee). The main suspect appears to be a former patient of Ted, but there may be more to it. Anyway, we then jump forward to find Ted in a new relationship (with Yana, played by Caroline Menton) and apparently trying to maintain a cordial relationship with Dani's twin sister, Darcy (Caroline Bracken again). Darcy is blind, but also claims to be clairvoyant and able to glean knowledge from objects that have an interesting history to them. Darcy still seeks closure on what happened to her sister, disbelieving the official explanation, and she eventually turns up to visit Ted and Yana at the house where the murder happened. She's not alone though, having previously sent a strange wooden mannequin to the address ahead of her arrival. Will that humanoid structure help her in any way, or is it just designed to unnerve her hosts as she tries to get at the truth of what happened to her sister?

A fantastic mix of spookiness and intermittent jump scares (and there's nothing wrong with a jump scare if it is a well-executed jump scare), Oddity may put some viewers off with the way in which everything seems slightly off-kilter and precisely staged, but that all adds to the unease as the plot starts to wind together on the way to a satisfying and beautifully dark finale. Colm Hogan deserves praise for cinematography that keeps things dark and unsettling without ever being impenetrably gloomy, and the score by Richard G. Mitchell is another element that works to keep viewers on edge. Mc Carthy has made something that could have easily been focused more on the mystery than the horror of the situation, but he uses every tool at his disposal to ensure that this is a claustrophobic and disturbing nightmare scenario that closes in on viewers right up until the very last scene.

Bracken is excellent in her main role (she's also very good as the ill-fated Dani, but it's Darcy who has much more screentime, for obvious reasons), and the other highlight is Tadhg Murphy, used to such great effect in the opening sequence. Menton also does well, and is the one person who seems able to see how strange and crazy the whole situation is, but she's disappointingly moved out of the way during some key sequences. As for Lee and Steve Wall (playing a colleague named Ivan), there's a rigidity and artifice there that works better for the atmosphere of the film than it does for the performers. Those performances are based on the idea of maintaining a polite smile on your face while mentally calculating the quickest way to get rid of someone who is proving to be a constant bother. 

Absolutely in line with Caveat, in terms of atmosphere and visual style, this essentially plays out like a few "Tales Of The Unexpected" bolted together and smoothly shaped into one feature, and that's not meant as any kind of criticism. I loved it, and I hope many others love it, but I can see why some may find it too low-key and uneven in tone (considering those mannered performances, and the fact that there's very dark humour running under some of the bleakest scenes).

8/10

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You Are Not My Mother (2021)

Another day, another excellent debut feature, this time from writer-director Kate Dolan (who some may already be aware of thanks to her excellent 2017 short, Catcalls). You Are Not My Mother is exactly what the title tells you it is, a tale of suspicion and a fractured parent/child relationship. It also veers very closely to a certain classic modern horror from the 1990s in a final sequence that somehow feels like a great homage without suffering in comparison.

Hazel Doupe plays Charlotte, AKA Char, a young woman who is struggling with the ups and downs of her mother, Angela (Carolyn Bracken). After a major depressive episode, Angela goes missing. She turns up again a while later, but Char senses something different about her. As her mother's behaviour becomes even more inexplicable, Char also has to fend with more bullying from Kelly (Katie White) and some of her cohorts, but also manages to start forming a friendship with a girl named Suzanne (Jordanne Jones). Can Char find out what has happened to her mother? Perhaps information that her gran (Ingrid Craigie) is reticent to share could help get things back to normal.

Basing her story on a very traditional bit of supernatural lore, Dolan does a nice job of grounding potential horror in a mundane modern world. Char doesn't seem to exactly be living her best life, having a generally awful experience that many teenagers end up going through, and the change in her mother is all the worse for her because, well, she could really do with parental support while having a tough time of things. The fact that her attempt to find out just what has changed her mother leads to a revelation about her own past manages to make things creepier while also making it more relatable, in a way that so many of us have been told tales of our childhood we have no memory of, be they amusing moments or something with a hint of spookiness to it.

The cast all do very good work. Doupe is able to deliver her performance without overdoing her awkwardness or anger, it's a perfect portrayal of the kind of teen girl trying to keep to herself who becomes, for some unknown reason, a shining target for bullies. White is enjoyably nasty, always flanked by friends who won't stop her from going too far, and Jones excels as someone who provides a small ray of sunshine as things look to be getting darker and darker. Bracken has to act quite detached from everything around her, and she does well, while Craigie does enough to improve her role slightly, considering that her main purpose seems to be providing the important exposition required before the third act really kicks into gear.

This would pair nicely with a varied mix of movies from the past few years that have explored parent/child relationships within a supernatural/horror/fantastical context, even with something as strange as Lamb, but it also feels enjoyably fresh. Dolan delivers the horror goods here and there, but she's savvy enough to try giving viewers a glimpse of very real pain and sadness, the alienating feeling of being a teenager unable to relate to, or get support from, a parent. Sometimes horror is an enjoyable genre to explore because it takes us away from reality for a while. Sometimes horror is worth exploring because it IS reality, and knowing that monsters can inevitably be defeated makes it easier to cope with the times that the monsters had their fun at our expense.

8/10

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