Oddity

2024 Directed by Damian McCarthy

Horror Marathon Day 18 Film 35

A blind woman tries to find the murderer of her twin sister. The prelude sets up her sister in isolated home in the woods with a courtyard almost like an asylum. The sister's husband works at one, and one night an escaped patient warns the sister that someone else is in the house. She's unable to really trust the one eyed man, and soon finds herself frantic to escape. A year later after her death the film starts with the death of the one eyed man, and as some macabre token the husband is able to give the false eye to the blind seer. The film sets up the atmosphere well, but the script has logical inconsistencies, with just a few moments of jump scares ... spoilers follow.

In most gothic stories the space itself becomes a character- Unfortunately while the exterior of the home is set up as a large foreboding thing, the interior focuses only on the small front room and bedroom instead of a space to explore. It seemed like a good portion of the scare for this film is being in an isolated space, and they could have done more to follow up with making that fear of the unknown part of the story. I felt like once the blind sister was there that there would be some uncovering of mystery to the house itself.

The blind sister tells the husband that she knows who killed her sister now- having seen the visions of the patient she knows that really it's been the orderly of the hospital that the husband works at. The husband rebuffs these claims until the sister also indicts the husband in the plan. You see the husband couldn't just leave her sister- he knew deep down that she'd never get over him and that he sunk too much of his money into the house to keep it (a ridiculously machismo moment).... and while this information is spelled out plainly in the film it pretty much undercuts the mystery horror of a creepy masked assailant that they've set up. Why bother to wear a creepy mask? Why have a camera taking pictures showing the dead sister's ghost? The antagonists just feel so cartoony - so self satisfied while the orderly that killed the wife seemed to do it in the most bloody way possible. For reasons?

I was put off at how mundane the crime was- and how during the climatic moments the blind woman just steps off into a trap door that somehow she never heard opened. Blindspoitation narratives can be full of tension, but here it just felt like another trope. There's a whole setup with a wooden mannequin that the seer can control- including a creepy moment where the new fling digs around in the mannequin's head, but when the seer finally uses the mannequin the power feels lacking. Sure she's able to do some damage to the men, but the revenge aspect was a let down. Instead it's replaced with a cutesy moment of the man ringing a bell he believes isn't haunted because of his pure science brain. The ghost of the dead sister only seemed to pop up to scare away the husband's fling- and not to aid in her sister's revenge either. Enough of these logical jumps pulled me out of the movie; making film is more ridiculous than haunting.