Isolation and Urbanity in Damian McCarthy’s “Oddity”
Yana: Do I look stupid?
Darcy: [who is blind] I have no idea what you look like. You sound stupid.
Yana: Excuse me?
Darcy: Do I look stupid?
Yana: No.
Darcy: My sister and I were identical, so that must mean that she didn't look stupid either.
Carolyn Bracken as Darcy Odello (above). The mannequin/golem creature (below).
Let me set the scene. It is a dark – but warm – All Hallow’s Eve, and I am exhausted. The candles burn low and the pumpkin rotting on my doorstep leers at passersby as the decay turns the corners of its mouth ever downwards – dripping towards the earth.
I’ve been in a slump. I stare into the void of the blank word file, and the void – its cursor winking in and out of existence – stares back at me. Taunting. And hideous.
Burnout comes in waves, and even when struck by inspiration in the moment, it has taken time to be able to mobilize each fleeting bolt of thought. All this to say, I wasn’t really in the mood to read anything that night, so I searched for a film instead. Months later, I am writing about it.
Damian McCarthy’s “Oddity” is spellbinding from frame one. Strumming the urban-rural divide, McCarthy twists class, authority, and assumption to weave mirror narratives of a home invasion in rural Ireland. Isolation is juxtaposed with urbanity, and the uneasiness of the Old Ways hums in the background as the story unfolds.
this section contains spoilers
The Film
The film begins with Dani Odello-Timmins (wife of local psychiatrist Ted Timmins) alone in their house in the countryside – a large estate that is being renovated, and does not yet have a phone line. A tent is pitched in the entryway, faintly lit by a battery-operated lantern, and a transistor radio provides a soft backdrop of sound.
Carolyn Bracken as Dani Odello.
McCarthy exploits this inherent uneasiness brilliantly, with Tadgh Murphy’s portrayal of Olin Boole playing into our fears in real time as he disturbs the silence with a warning: get to your car, and run. You are not safe here.
Olin’s warning spurs her further inward, where she barricades the doors and prepares to wait Olin out. This decision proves fatal, as Dani Odello is murdered by a masked assailant, alone in her country house. Olin Boole is deemed the killer, and is later found dead in his lodgings – headless.
Tadgh Murphy as Olin Boole.
A year or so later, Ted finds his way to Cabinet of Curiosities in Cork – a curio shop run by Darcy Odello, Dani’s twin sister. The likeness is uncanny, as Darcy is the spitting image of Dani with a few key differences: Darcy is blind, and ostensibly clairsalient. Instead of having the gift of Sight (a common trope among blind characters in British & Irish horror), Darcy can read objects, gleaning knowledge of the owner through the visions she gains when touching or handling their belongings.
Ted and Darcy make plans to visit, as Ted looks over an antique desk bell and Darcy nonchalantly informs him that everyone who has rung it is later found dead. In return, Ted gives Darcy Olin Boole’s glass eye – and she is able to glean the truth: namely, that he did not kill Dani, and that his death did not, in fact, avenge her murder. Darcy is later seen unboxing something from a large crate while weeping, chanting, and praying.
A few days later, Darcy arrives at Ted’s estate — a large crate in tow. Ted now lives in the house with his girlfriend Yana, and the timing of the two’s relationship is ambiguous – a fact that Darcy attacks directly while unpacking and positioning an offputting wooden mannequin. Ted is called to a psychiatric emergency in the city, and leaves Yana alone in the house with Darcy and the mannequin.
Caroline Menton as Yana (left). The golem (right).
This is where the story takes a turn, as the mannequin begins to move. Subtly, at first, although Yana’s examination of the petrified wood makes it clear that it shouldn’t be moving. Noting the openings in the back of its skull, she removes (and then, at Darcy’s commanding request), replaces the viles of blood, hair, nails, and the photographs she finds in its cavernous skull.
Spiritual activity in the house begins to increase as Darcy searches for the truth, combing through Ted’s objects looking for clues. Yana, terrified beyond belief of the spirits that appear, flees the estate and takes refuge in a hotel, as the narrative spins to focus on Ted.
McCarthy’s use of retrospect to retell the story from the beginning adds a layer to the horror, as Ted’s carefully orchestrated plan is revealed. Ted – using his sway at the hospital – contracts a psychopathic orderly (Ivan) to murder his wife in their estate. Ted wants out of the marriage to pursue his relationship with Yana, but has “too much equity tied up in the house” and doesn’t wish to part with it in the divorce proceedings, so he unleashes Ivan on her on the day of Olin Boole’s release.
Dani has gleaned all of this psychically through her examination of the house, and confronts Ted when he returns to find Yana gone and Darcy alone with the mannequin. Ted leaves, sending Ivan once again to do his dirty work, and Darcy loses her life in the fray. The mannequin, controlled by Darcy until she succumbs to her injuries, mauls Ivan — but doesn’t succeed in killing him.
Gwilym Lee as Ted Timmins.
Ted – in an attempt to cover his crimes, unleashes a violent cannibal on Ivan to ensure he can’t go to the authorities, and burns the remnants of Darcy’s mannequin. Yana leaves him – disturbed by his lack of revulsion to living in a house where two women have died – and he settles into his reclusive life in the country estate.
The film ends when a mysterious package from Darcy’s shop arrives addressed to Ted. In it is a bell, supposedly haunted, and a note warning the owner not to ring it. Ted, a true skeptic, rings it, waits, and then smiles to himself as his home remains unchanged. The film ends with the spirit of a bellboy standing behind Ted, and the scene fades to black.
The Analysis
Colour
What strikes me, first and foremost, about this film is that it is warm. McCarthy plays with yellow and red-tinted shots, breaking away from “cool and eerie” imagery to a kind of warm coziness that places the incidents of the narrative in stark contrast to the visual mood. “Just like every other genre, horror spans the entire spectrum of colors in beautiful (and sometimes disgusting) ways,” and McCarthy’s commitment to gold tones only makes the climax of the film more impactful with its sudden, piercing use of ice white and cool blue.
McCarthy here is playing with mood. Moods in horror, defined by Andrea Sauchelli, “are mental states that differ from other emotional or affective states in certain important ways, despite their many similarities and inter-connections,” and primarily address the state of affect that occurs independently of cognitive input or environmental state. For example, one can have a perfectly lovely day, but still be depressed, making depression the mood of the scene.
What makes McCarthy’s slowburn narrative so effective is, in part, his use of colour to contrast mood with reality. Warm tones, yellow light, a well-furnished, well-light, and newly renovated country estate makes the film feel comfortable and cozy rather than cold and insular. As such, when the horror happens, the viewer is left grappling with the cognitive dissonance of the affect of the mood, and the affect of the horror. This is juxtaposition of familiarity and the unknown (warm and cool, cozy and threatening) is important, as it renders the film distinct in how it grapples with the urban-rural divide: a concept that has taken centre stage in Irish horror cinema in the last 15 (or so) years.
Setting
Films like The Hallow (2015) and You are Not My Mother (2021) play with elements of rural Ireland through the lens of folklore (and, in particular, the fae), whereas films like Caveat (2020) examine claustrophobic isolation more closely. What these films tend to have in common is the use of the “tourist gaze”, as Seán Crosson puts it. The tourist gaze acknowledges the idyllic view of Ireland through the expectations of tourists, city-dwellers, and heritage seekers, and subverts it by centring the scathing suspicion (if not hatred) of the tourist’s disruption of everyday life in the country. Speaking to the urban-rural divide, Seán Crosson writes:
Rural Ireland is often depicted in contemporary Irish horror film, as “The Braineater” suggests, as a place far removed from the welcoming and reassuring locale represented in tourist iconography. It is a space haunted by the hideous monsters of biological farming experiments (Billy O’Brien’s “Isolation”), or a tortured girl’s nightmares (Eric Courtney’s “Seer”); populated by meat-eating zombies who appear without warning, attack and devour (Conor McMahon’s “Dead Meat”); tormented by the traumatised victims of clerical abuse who, it seems until the film’s surprising climax, pick off their victims one by one (in Paddy Breatnach’s “Shrooms”); and afflicted by an apparently demonic fairy changeling child adopted by an unsuspecting immigrant English couple (Aisling Walsh’s “The Daisy Chain”). Interestingly, in both “Dead Meat” and “Shrooms”, it is tourists who constitute the central protagonists. In “Shrooms”, the American students who have come to rural Ireland to experiment with drugs, are all, bar one, horrifically killed by the narrative’s close – hardly a story Fáilte Ireland (the current Irish National Tourism Development Authority) would wish to promote…
McCarthy’s Oddity tackles the urban-rural divide provincially, having Ted cannibilize it, taking advantage of the supposed isolation and hostility of the countryside to do his dirty work. The audience is prescribed the tourist’s gaze, and our assumptions are preyed on by Ted, and, metatextually, McCarthy as well. It is the tourists’s gaze that sets the “twist” up to be so powerful, and it is the tourist’s gaze that I think foregrounds the urban-rural divide in Oddity and contemporary Irish horror cinema at large.
I think McCarthy’s take on this is brilliant for a few reasons: one, it plays on assumption beautifully, and as the plot unravels it can make the viewer feel a bit sheepish for falling into Ted’s manipulation; two, it foregrounds class in a way that was unexpected and yet perfectly logical; and three, it sets Darcy up to be the sharpest character in the film, which is a refreshing deviation from the dottering, spacey psychic trope.
The Old Ways
In some ways, the “science vs witchcraft” conflict can be considered an extension of the urban-rural divide, but that’s an argument for another paper. Here, I’d like to focus on how McCarthy weaves the “old ways” into the narrative.
Darcy is whip-smart and tenacious, and despite Ted’s attempts to discredit her psychic prowess as schizophrenia (he is a psychiatrist, after all), time and time again she proves that her methods are just as effective as his, even if they are unorthodox. Her rituals, divinations, and channeling are all the more disconcerting because she is so grounded. Darcy is sharp, astute, and profoundly logical, so when she slips into the Old Ways, she does so with intention. Her use of the golem (mannequin) to avenge her sister’s murder, then, is both psychic and psychological warfare, with the golem’s presence and Darcy’s sharpness serving to destabilize both Ted and Yana.
I think Darcy serves as such a force because she does not take her visions as gospel, but rather, uses her psychic prowess as a tool to guide further investigation and inform her confrontations. She perfectly marries magic and logic, and that encourages even the most skeptical of viewers to suspend their disbelief long enough to get lost in the story. This logical magic, too, positions Darcy as a skilled adversary for Ted – as she is almost impossible to manipulate. In a way Darcy is almost a bit of a foil for Ted: just as Ted uses science and medicine to inform lies, Darcy uses magic and the occult to inform truth.
Darcy’s commitment to logic serves the final frame of the film beautifully, as it is a gorgeous checkmate in a bloody game of logic between her and Ted. Ted – skeptic to the end – takes Darcy’s bait, and Darcy’s failsafe plan is a testament to her psychological read of Ted’s character. Even if Darcy knows the bell she sends him is haunted, Ted will never believe it, and she knows he is haughty enough to ring it to satisfy his own ego. She doesn’t curse him or trick him: she baits him into engaging in a field of play he has no knowledge of or respect for, and he falls right into her psychological trap, just as she fell through his physical one.
In a way McCarthy has levelled the playing field between the Old Ways and the New in this film. Instead of giving any one side an inherent advantage, he positions both as equal adversaries of the other. In marrying the occult with logic and science with manipulation, McCarthy weaves a compelling narrative that twists established tropes and paves the way for new and thrilling possibilities in future narratives.
Conclusion
I loved this film. There is a short film from 2013 on Olin Boole and the loss of his eye, which is now on my watch list, and will likely check out Caveat (2020) before the New Year.
I don’t have many gripes about the film, but the few I do have aren’t insignificant. I do wish we had not seen the golem move, as I think it would have been much more disconcerting if we had only seen it after it had moved, in a kind of weeping angel effect. I wasn’t a huge fan of the ghost effects either as they seemed too animated (and not tangible enough to be truly ‘spooky’), but that’s a gripe I have with most films as effects become more and more computer-reliant and less attention is paid to practical or mixed effects.
This is a film I will happily rewatch, and it has certainly earned a place among my horror favourites, which is difficult to do.
All in all, I am excited to see what McCarthy does next.
Until the next long, dark, rainy night,
L
Works Cited
Crosson, Seán. “Aspects of Contemporary Irish Horror Cinema.” Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media, 15 Apr. 2012, https://doi.org/10.15353/kinema.vi.1274.
McCarthy, Damian, director. Oddity. Keeper Pictures, 2024.
Sauchelli, Andrea. “Horror and Mood.” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 1, Jan. 2014, pp. 39–50. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24475369
