Oddity (2024)

Haunting, droning synths and violins slowly guide our high-flying drone cameras to a nice little stone palace, where a hipster millenial lady is living in a tent and capturing photos of the front door with a DSLR on a time-lapse timer. The shots are carefully framed and symmetrical. She calls her husband, Ted, a doctor at an insane asylum with low-volume echoing shrieks in the background. The palace is a renovation project, which helpfully means it has very little lighting. She putters around slowly and symmetrically until a one-eyed man peers into the preview hatch of her security door and tells her there's somebody in the palace with her. She's weirdly calm and symmetrical about it. They have a slow, symmetrical conversation. The cut to opening credits is magnificent; this film's got style.

Back in the asylum, an inmate hears some spooky noises and finds his neighbor's head exploded. The neighbor had one fake eye. Relatedly, Ted goes to visit his sister-in-law, Darcy, who owns a voodoo shop of cursed and haunted trinkets. He gifts her a cursed trinket from a former patient, the one-eyed man, who we learn has killed the wife/sister and then died himself. We also learn that the time-lapse camera was for ghosts, and the sisters were up to some ghost hunting. Everything is nicely slow, while not being too slow. And symmetrical.

Darcy scries her sister's death from the exploded one-eyed man's false eye, and envisions a goofball in a raincoat. She runs straight back to her cabinet of curiosities to dramatically hug a chest while we check out her cool horror collectibles. Darcy is blind, which wasn't immediately obvious. She mails the big chest to Ted. Ted's new girlfriend, Yana, now lives with him in the renovated palace, and finds the DSLR. She takes some pictures, and they have dead-wife ghosts in the corners.

Blind Darcy shows up unannounced and imposes herself on the annoyed couple. Ted skips off to work to look at the horrific scribbled paintings of lunacy from his patients while Darcy torments his easily-irritable girlfriend. Darcy says, "I was hoping the three of us could spend some time together," when the two of them are forced to spend some time together. Darcy pops open the chest and introduces them to a life-sized screaming-mouthed zombie statue, and wryly insults her hostess. Everybody is casually rude to everybody else in the whole film.

Darcy casts doubt on the one-eyed-man murder story, and a flashback of her sister being hammered to death by the goofy raincoat man seems to confirm it. Darcy takes a nap while Yana pokes around the screaming zombie statue and pokes things into its various satanic crevices. It's just full of magic trinkets, which she pulls out and studies and presents to the camera. Out-of-tune string instruments modulate excitedly in the background, until Darcy stands up and screams with anger: the doodads are not to be disturbed. Yana goes upstairs to poke around on the DSLR memory card, which is where the ghosts live.

Darcy walks us through the flashbacks explaining how Ted is behind his wife's murder. In response, Ted sets a Looney Toons murder trap for Darcy, but that's just going to get him two ghosts. Or maybe three, if you count the zombie carcass. Ted sends his coworker to the house to see how many ghosts they have now, and the filmmakers show off their remarkable prowess at shooting a haunted house hunt. It takes it time – slowly, calmly – and lets the environment breathe, somehow without getting tedious. Ted returns home and rings the bell of foreshadowing, allows a moment or several for foreboding tension, and it ends with elegance and grace.