Oddity

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Oddity (2024)

Trailer

After a creepy played-straight introduction that cuts before the key murder, the victim’s sister seeks answers, using her power of psychometry and an array of cursed items, including the heavily featured lifesize articulated wooden carving of a screaming man, which is mostly there to be weird and disturbing in a sort of funny way. And the whole film pretty much feels like that, which worked once I got on its wavelength.

(At another scare point I realised I’d seen writer and director Damian Mc Carthy’s work before, as he revisits early short Hungry Hickory that screened here at Dead By Dawn.)

With a less prominent example in Black As Night, it made an unintentional double bill featuring an uncommon development -

- a character gets scared off and flees, successfully escaping the rest of the film.