Personal Items Work Best: Oddity (2024)

“And if you’re thinking of stealing something, you should know that every item in here is cursed.”

It is not surprising that Mike Flanagan has been effusive in his praise of Oddity. You could probably tell a casual moviegoer that Flanagan had directed this film and they would have no real reason to doubt you.

Though broadly very popular, Flanagan’s work tends to be polarizing, especially since his move into the world of mini-series. I myself rarely regret catching one of his flicks (though I’ve never watched any of his series), but I also seldom love them. And I didn’t necessarily love Oddity, either, but if Flanagan had directed it, it would be near the top of his particular heap for me.

Flanagan didn’t direct Oddity, though. Damian McCarthy did, a sophomore follow-up to his 2020 debut Caveat, known mainly for its ragged rabbit doll, featured prominently in the film’s advertising. At the time of this writing, I haven’t seen Caveat yet, but Oddity was enough to give me the kick I probably needed to do so.

As such, I can’t say much about the parallels between that film and this one, save to say that they both involve fetishistic central objects – the rabbit doll from that movie even makes a brief cameo in this one. Here, Carolyn Bracken plays the dual roles of identical twin sisters Darcy Odello and Dani Odello-Timmis. The latter dies violently early on, though we don’t see the actual murder until much further down the road. The former then sets to work on getting revenge on her sister’s killer, using her own powers and the supposedly cursed artifacts that come from the antique shop left to her by her mother.

Central to this plan is a human-sized wooden mannequin, given to Darcy and Dani’s mother by “a witch” on her fifth wedding anniversary. This mannequin sits inert at the heart of the film – and its marketing. As such, if you’ve seen even a single trailer, clip, or ad for Oddity, or even its poster, then you’ve seen the mannequin.

Reading Letterboxd reviews, it seems unavoidable to conclude that the mannequin is, in fact, creepy looking. And while aesthetically I would have liked the design better if it actually looked like it was made of wood, rather than like a Spirit Halloween foam latex prop, it’s also probably undeniable that the fact that it looks like a suit that a person could be wearing adds to the sensation that it might spring to life at any moment – a sensation that is pivotal to much of the film’s tension.

Around the mannequin we have operating a sort of murder mystery – revealed often in flashback and through out-of-sequence events – that has the most obvious possible solution. It’s not so much the working out of whodunit that drives the film as the tension that exists around what Darcy’s character obviously knows, and what she plans to do about it.

Darcy is blind, you see, the result of a brain tumor. She also claims to be able to “read” objects, a talent known as psychometry. By handling something – “personal items work best,” she says – she can tell you the item’s history. It’s how she knows that the official story of her sister’s death isn’t the true one.

The official story is that her sister was killed by a patient released from the nearby mental institution where her doctor husband works nights. And if you think you’ve already solved the mystery, then you’re basically right. But again, it isn’t really the solution that’s the selling point here, it’s getting there, and what happens once we’ve arrived.

Oddity is an extremely slow burn, though it keeps elements of eeriness and dread close at hand throughout its running time. There are hints that Darcy may be imagining all of this, that the tumor pressing on her brain is causing her to hallucinate. There are long conversations filled with ominous pauses and monologues about faith and rationality, closed minds and open ones. Mike Flanagan shit, in other words.

And in many ways, the playing out of the tensions between the hard-headed rationality of Dr. Timmis and Darcy’s open-ended mysticism is maybe more interesting than the solution to her sister’s grisly murder. There are certainly questions left unanswered by the end of the film, but the conflict between skepticism and belief comes to a fairly vicious and unusually pointed resolution.

Mostly, it is the way that new information is folded into Oddity’s narrative that keeps what could easily be a tired and well-worn story interesting. Oddity manages to operate in the register of both the quiet ghost story and the EC horror comic at the same time, feeling like an unusually sedate episode of Tales from the Crypt or Creepshow. If you’re coming here for some vengeful mannequin carnage, you will mostly be disappointed, but if you want a quiet, slow-burn ghost story, you’re in good wooden hands.

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.