A stranger comes knocking in Oddity (Mc Carthy, 2024)
Chris Forrester considers how 2024’s eerie and unexpected Oddity fits within the landscape of recent horror films.
Nearly every year in recent memory has yielded one or two horror movies subjected to a repetitive, now-familiar cycle of discourse: fanatic pre-release hype, a marketing campaign that plays up the scare factor, and an inevitably divisive audience response shaped by the degree to which the film is or is not the one advertised. It happened to Hereditary (Aster, 2018), it happened to Talk to Me (Philippous, 2022), and most recently it happened to Longlegs (Perkins, 2024). Expectation is always a killer of enjoyment, but that becomes doubly so with horror films where the genre-wide blanket expectation for fear is so often at odds with the varied ambitions of the artists working within it. Much as it’s fun to expect scares and be served them in bloody glory, there’s a certain pleasure to the experience of discovery one can get from going in sans expectations.
That’s precisely the viewing experience I’d recommend for anyone curious about Oddity (Mc Carthy, 2024), a genre-bending new horror film that charts a path more akin to recent hits Malignant (Wan, 2021) and Barbarian (Cregger, 2022) that defy expectation for a twisting, surprising mishmashing of influences whose unpredictability has kept them just shy of the critical favoritism that built hype for movies like Midsommar (Aster, 2019) and Saint Maud (Glass, 2019) — and thus freed them from the confines of our presuppositions. Much of the pleasure, then, comes from the surprise of watching its clever pastiche unfold.
In keeping with my appreciation for the pleasures of its construction, I’ll say no more of the film’s premise than that it begins with a frightfully enticing dilemma: alone for the night at the countryside home she’s renovating with her husband, a woman is greeted at her door by a strange man with a glass eye. He says he saw someone enter the house while her back was turned gathering boxes from her car. Does she choose the possibility of a threat within her walls or the possibility of the one outside becoming one? We won’t know for a while, because the film cuts away to another bit of drama, leaving the particulars of her choice and its aftermath to hang over us for a while.
So unfolds, at least for a sizable portion of its runtime, Oddity, a film where more than the terror of any one threat or …oddity… much of the fun emerges from the suspense of its construction, which keeps us on our toes as if leading us somewhere strange with a blindfold tight over our eyes. Bit by bit, twist by twist, we glean a greater sense of how its many pieces fit together and where the carefully assembled arrangement of interlocking flashbacks around its central narrative — a deceptively simple one, I might add, lest these suggestions of its craftsmanly complexities amount to the precise kind of “scariest movie ever” hype that’s set many a horror new release up to underwhelm — is ultimately leading us.
Adorning that simple core, too, is a bevy of enjoyably sketched supporting characters, including one brought to life in a fun dual performance by Carolyn Bracken as both the woman of the opening scene and the blond curio shopkeeper central to much of the film’s promo material and whose keen investigative knack and sense of quietly seething righteousness is the spark that ignites the film’s slow-burn. Around Bracken is a pleasantly tight ensemble with nary a performance wasted; perhaps at the expense of a certain degree of expansiveness, the film is sharp and economical in its deployment of characters, and each finely drawn performance is of clear significance to the central dramas and mysteries, though given enough breathing room for some pleasurably chewy genre eccentricities.
Increasingly over the past few years — I’d say since The Babadook mounted something of a turning point in critical attention toward horror cinema — the horror film has two opposing extremes. There are the cheap and bad ones that critics and audiences write off as junk-food schlock at best (think M3GAN, The Bye Bye Man, The Curse of La Llorona, the Saw films) and those of greater merit (Pearl, Raw, A Quiet Place), a merit expressed often in terms of how much restraint they show in comparison to their lower, gorier genre compatriots. The critical preference is for slower films that build a gradually mounting dread through formal technique rather than express themselves through score, visual design, or gore effects (Rob Zombie’s terrific Halloween remakes; M. Night Shyamalan’s sad, wacky Old; Ridley Scott’s ugly, deliriously ambitious Alien: Covenant). Increasingly what feels lost in the shuffle is the kind of thoughtfully made, genre-intelligent filmmaking that occasionally crops up in a cult hit like Malignant or Barbarian or big-swing ambition endeavors like The Empty Man (Prior, 2020) and Suspiria (Guadagnino, 2018).
This isn’t to say that Oddity necessarily holds a candle to those films or that its surprises put it on the level of genre classics, modern or otherwise (again, expectations!) — I will even confess to finding its endgame rather underwhelming given the obvious care of the intricate pathway there — but that there is a certain pleasure to be found in this kind of film that puts care into both being a horror movie and constructing itself as one. All throughout, one can quite palpably feel the filmmakers’ appreciation for the genre as an expansive landscape through which to carve out a specific vision rather than something to subvert, or worse, elevate. It’s also not to say that the film isn’t more in line with the brand of slow-burning, dread-building, gore-shy horror ignorantly but unavoidably dubbed “elevated” horror by what I can only imagine as an insufferably haughty room of self-serious fools (again, were I to criticize it more thoroughly I would spend a great many words dwelling on this topic in particular), but rather that it at least occupies the now set-in-stone sensibilities of contemporary indie horror with a studious sense of care and finds within them room for something a little more exciting than the same-old-same-old of Ari Aster and the other cheap imitators of art horror who’ve spawned in his wake.
In a year where horror discourse has been caught between the twin poles of MaXXXine (a smelly garbage dump of a film) and Longlegs (an interesting affair largely impossible to separate from the unmatchable pre-release hype), it’s refreshing to make time for something more thoughtful and less over-litigated: an oddity in name and function, if you will. And in a broader filmgoing landscape where the breakneck propulsivity of cultural conversation pushes every new release so immediately toward unsustainably hyperbolic praise (do we even remember the film that went #1 on the Letterboxd highest rated narrative feature films chart last summer anymore?) or immediate disregard (sorry, Furiosa), it’s nice to be reminded of the simple pleasures of a lovingly made genre exercise.
Oddity screens on October 18 at 10pm as part of Friday Night Frights.