31 Days of Halloween: Oddity

2024, Damian McCarthy (Caveat) -- Shudder

The opening ten minutes of this Irish movies were more tense than all of the movies we have seen this season. In it, a woman, Dany (Carolyn Bracken, You Are Not My Mother), is alone in a recently renovated coach house in the Irish countryside, remote enough that there is only one spot upstairs where she can get strong cell signal. Her husband Dr. Timmis (Gwilym Lee, The Great) works nights at the local asylum when she hears someone jiggle the door handle, just after she returned from looking for said cell phone in the car. She slides back the peep whole to see a wild looking man with a glass eye (Tadhg Murphy, Time Bandits) telling her someone is in the house with her, he slipped in while she as at the car.

Alone, no cell phone, stranger outside, possible stranger inside. Let him in? Is he a killer? Is the killer already inside? What will she do? This opening scene was just ... so tightly done, so tense.

A year later. She died. She let him in. He was a patient of her husband who had been recently released after a decade behind locked doors for killing his mother with a hammer. Her husband has gone by to see his late wife's sister, a twin, blind and owner of a curio shoppe, full of oddities. She claims to have psychometry, where she can feel impressions from objects. She has asked for the glass eye from her sister's murderer. Dr. Timmis invites his sister-in-law over to the house, where he still stays, but now with is new girlfriend. But not immediately, not right now. She is not happy that he has moved on so soon, and in the house where her sister was murdered.

The sister Darcy (Carolyn Bracken, The Lodgers) has a box delivered to them, and then just shows up, just as Timmis is about to had back into town, and his girlfriend Yana is heading out soon after. Awkward. A blind woman with no knowledge of the house, says she wants to stay, if that's alright. Weird. Also, the box has the most strange, creepy, fucking scary looking "oddity" from the sisters' dead mother's collection -- some sort of wooden golem or homunculus -- a life sized, roughly carved figure with hollow eyes, an open mouth and holes in its head like a bowling ball. Yana's keys go missing and the oddity has been placed at the dining room table.

I would like to say the movie does things I didn't expect, but... no, it was pretty trope driven and in our exposure to horror plots, pretty much by the book. But it was well executed. And that oddity. Its not even a monster, just a wooden thing, but I am not sure how anyone would want to be in its presence. It is just fucking unnerving. Of course, it plays its role in the discovery of how Dany actually died, her actual murderer (not the mad looking one-eyed man) which I don't feel like spoiling, but if you are like, us you can probably guess.

But still, that fucking .... thing. shudder.