This review was made possible by an early screener of Oddity. Oddity releases in theaters on July 19th, 2024.

Shudder Roulette has been wild lately, with the wife and I coming across a lot more bad movies than good ones. It’s been an unfortunate turn of fate for our favorite streaming service, but this kind of stuff is cyclical; it always comes back around. That’s why it’s a roulette, though. You can’t win every round. But sometimes when you win, you win big!

The newest effort coming to Shudder is called Oddity. It starts off as with Dani (Carolyn Bracken), a stay-at-home wife taking care of a new property she and her husband have moved into. It’s a rural house far out in the middle of nowhere, and one night Dani gets a visit from a deranged man crying out that he saw another man enter her home when she wasn’t looking. She seems torn as to whether or not to believe him and let him into her home…

And then the movie jumps forward a year! Dani ended up getting murdered that very night, and her husband has moved on with a new partner named Yana (Caroline Menton), the two of them living in the now-finished house where she tragically met her fate. 

The husband, Ted (Gwilym Lee), finds the glass eye of the man who visited Dani that night–he has since been convicted of her murder–and he reluctantly brings it to her blind twin sister, Darcy. Darcy runs an antique shop where she claims all of the items are cursed, and she purports to have the ability to read personal objects and tell the story of their owners. She wants the glass eye so she can find out more about the man who killed her sister.

Not long after that, Darcy shows up at Ted and Yana’s home, having brought along a strange gift of a large wooden man! Despite the couple’s protests, Darcy makes herself at home and the night just gets more bizarre from there…

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Oddity takes advantage of jump scares–there are several of them throughout the movie, to be honest–but unlike a lot of modern day horror films that use them almost unthinkingly, Oddity’s jump scares feel earned. They take place at moments in the movie where the tension is at its peak, and the scares are well-executed.

When combined with some excellent editing around scenes–I’m particularly thinking of the moment where we finally see Dani’s demise, which is cut so brilliantly–the jumps are just so well put together, I could not be upset at the movie for utilizing them. 

+ Speaking of the scene where we see Dani meet her ultimate fate, the movie does a fun job for its first half setting up the mystery of what happened to her and how. Did the crazy man at her door get her? Was he telling the truth? Was there something supernatural involved? Was it just a more run-of-the-mill murder?

As the movie jumps from the opening sequence to one year later, the viewer is left with these questions. It is happy to leave the viewer wondering what exactly happened to Dani while it moves on with the modern story of Ted’s new life and Darcy’s strange visit. And just when your guard is down and you are into the tale the movie is spinning, Oddity leaps backwards and shows you Dani’s fate. 

It’s impeccably well-told and effective!

– A trope I’m not sure I’ll ever totally need to see again in fiction is that of the Magical Disabled Person. In worlds where everything else is down-to-Earth and “normal”, we occasionally get these stories where someone’s disability proves to somehow give them extraordinary abilities. And that’s what Oddity gives us with Darcy.

The unfortunate aspect of it is that Darcy’s blindness seems to exist for only one reason, a third act moment where it really comes into play. Aside from that moment, she might as well have been a sighted person the whole time. So for her to fall into this trope just feels like an unfortunate decision by the filmmakers. 

– Without getting into spoilers, I will say that the film kind of unravels a bit late. For more than an hour, it’s a very tense, tremendously made suspense tale. But partway through the last act, the resolution starts feeling a touch cliche and the happenings of the plot start getting a little sillier.

Additionally, the movie ends on a final moment which runs a bit too long. It’s obvious why it goes as long as it does, but if it were me, I’d have cut it off probably a minute before the film itself does. But that’s probably subjective. There is just a bit of what I found to be too much showing when the suspense works without a direct reveal.

I’m not saying the shift in the last half an hour was enough to ruin what came before it–it wasn’t–but it was enough to force me to downgrade my overall rating by a bit. 

OVERALL

For two-plus acts, Oddity is a very intriguing slow-burn horror movie that despite its slower tempo still has an excellent mood and some genuine scares. Sometimes “slow-burn” can translate into “nothing happens”, but that’s sure not the case here, as the characters are interesting and the mystery will leave you guessing. It’s all brilliantly made, too! Unfortunately it fumbles the ball just a bit late, and the final scene goes on a hair too long. 

Still, I really enjoyed this despite its late failings. Give it a watch!

3.5 out of 5