150 Word Review: 'Oddity' (2024)

Gifts from hell

Photo: Shudder

I love cursed dolls! And there’s one in director Damian McCarthy's inventive Oddity: The Wooden Man is a hand-carved, man-sized Golem owned by Darcy, a blind psychic who owns a shop full of haunted trinkets. Darcy wants revenge on whoever killed her twin sister, and she has her suspicions.

Oddity is a low-budget horror mystery that feels bespoke even if it's built out of familiar bits and bobs—there's a pinch of Wait Until Dark and Hellraiser, for instance. The movie's familiar one moment, WTF the next.

What the movie lacks in money, it makes up for in yikes. No one is safe. McCarthy is a devious filmmaker who earns every jump scare. Carolyn Bracken plays both sisters, the victim and the avenger. She is very good at seeming helpless. Gwilym Lee is perfect as the dead sister's shifty husband, as is the Shutter Island-like asylum he runs with a henchman.

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