Gwilym Lee, Carolyn Bracken, Tadhg Murphy and Caroline Menton star in McCarthy’s SXSW world premiere.

Creepy-doll characters are a fixture of countless horror movies, although few are as imposing as the life-size wooden mannequin that figures centrally in Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy’s Oddity. Rather than relying on an overtly identifiable genre template however, McCarthy’s second feature incorporates a distinctly internalized, foreboding atmosphere of dread that’s more unnerving than particularly frightening.

A year after the grisly home-invasion murder of his wife Dani (Carolyn Bracken) at their isolated country residence in southwestern Ireland, physician Ted Timmis (Gwilym Lee) is still living there, not far from where he works at a nearby psychiatric hospital. On the anniversary of Dani’s murder, which police have attributed to Ted’s former mental patient Olin Boole (Tadhg Murphy), her twin sister Darcy (also played by Bracken), a blind spiritual medium, shows up unexpectedly at the house, surprising Ted and his girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton). Darcy presents Ted with the gift of a wooden mannequin the size of an adult that’s packed inside a large trunk, explaining that it belonged to her mother and she now wants to give it to Ted, who recoils at the sight of the extremely odd figure.

It’s also disquieting for Yana, who’s left alone with the blind clairvoyant when Ted departs for the hospital. Before long, she begins hearing strange noises around the house, imagining that the mannequin changes positions, shifting from the trunk to an upright sitting position at the dining table. Darcy meanwhile appears to have fallen into a trance, but she may in fact be attempting to animate the mannequin, whose head begins grotesquely swiveling around.

Frightened and desperate, Yana phones Ted for help, but before he can return she flees, leaving him to deal with Darcy. She tells him that her reading of a very personal item of Boole’s reveals that he didn’t murder Ted’s wife (just before his death in a subsequent violent attack), escalating the pair’s intense confrontation over the identity of Dani’s murderer.  

McCarthy’s approach to his original script is marked by an admirable economy of both narrative and style. Withholding plot details, limiting the cast to a bare minimum and confining the action to just a few claustrophobic locations combine to amplify an escalating sense of unease. The varied mix of horror conventions from haunted-house, slasher and paranormal sub-genres also keeps viewers uncomfortably off-balance, confounding attempts to predict the film’s outcome, although McCarthy’s inclination to push violence offscreen, while minimizing bloodshed, tends to de-emphasize key plot developments.

Aza Hand’s ominous sound design and composer Richard G. Mitchell’s tense score skillfully conceal some of these deficiencies, however, effectively propelling the action throughout the film. Interestingly, Oddity’s plot bears some resemblance to the unsolved 1996 murder of a woman in the same area, portrayed in Netflix’s 2021 limited docuseries Sophie: A Murder in West Cork.