Irish director Damian Mc Carthy follows up his 2020 feature debut, Caveat, with this fun and frightening riff on the old haunted doll schtick.
How to watch Oddity in Australia
Oddity is now streaming in Australia on AppleTV+.
What is Oddity about?
A year after his wife, Dani, is brutally murdered by a released psychiatric patient, psychiatrist Ted Timmis and his new girlfriend, Yana, receive a visit from Dani’s twin sister, the blind psychic Darcy, who’s convicned that there’s more to her sibling’s horrific death than meets the eye. She brings with her a life size and unarguably creepy wooden mannequin from her curiosity shop. Is there more to Dani’s murder? You betcha. Will that unsettling thing come to unnatural life at some point? Again, you betcha.
Interestingly, the character of Olin Boole, the patient convicted of Dani’s murder, first cropped up in Mc Carthy’s 2003 short film How Olin Lost His Eye, which makes this a sequel of sorts. Here, check it out.
The cast of Oddity
Gwilym Lee, who played guitar legend Brian May in Bohemian Rhapsody, is Ted Timmis; Carolyn Bracken, last seen in the quite wonderful The Quiet Girl, plays both Dani and Darcy; Tadhg Murphy is Olin Boole; Caroline Menton is Yana; with Steve Wall and Jonathan French in support.
Oddity trailer
Why we’re excited about Oddity
The early reviews are extremely promising. Oddity handily scooped up the Audience Award in the Midnighter section of this year’s SXSW Festival, and the critics have been fairly lavish with praise, with the Rotten Tomatoes consensus noting: “An elegant and spooky ghost story punctuated with clever jolts, Oddity hews to the fundamentals of fright and achieves shout-inducing results.”
Plus, we kind of love the kitchen sink approach to horror. A murder mystery and a psychic and a haunted doll and a psycho killer all in one neat little package? Heck yes, we’re gonna check this one out.
