Damian McCarthy’s Irish-junkshop genre riff Oddity comes pig-piling atop an already sky-high stack of low-mid-budget horror movies — which seems to be one out of every three films released nowadays, dutifully hoovered up by a Zoomer cohort newly discovering the genre’s capacity for subversion. As per Theodore Sturgeon’s law (90% of everything is crap), it’s a scattered field, as always, on a scale that runs from inept to drearily derivative to conventional to startlingly New Weird. McCarthy’s films, including 2020’s Caveat, hit the middle register, despite a respectable arsenal of creepy obsessions and a taste for Hammer Films–style phantasmagoria.

Horror movies, at least in the post-Gothic era largely initiated by the 1968 double tap of Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Living Dead, can, at their best, exude metaphoric poison, sparking modern anxieties and skewering our middle-class sense of privilege and security. That’s their political secret sauce, the demolition of control —  it’s the genre that trusts no one. Sometimes, though, a genre movie is just a genre movie, and McCarthy’s are enthusiastically just that — their peculiar and specific grottiness keeps them from resonating outward. Caveat (easily the least-promising horror-film title of all time, however apt within the film itself) established McCarthy’s menu: decaying country houses full of ghost-generating family malfeasance, hidden-reveal narrative twists, and a nostalgic yen for old-school Gothic ideas and haunted antiques, all on an Irish-size budget and shot in County Cork.

Oddity has more story but less juice. In a spectacular courtyard house-castle in the country, the wife (Carolyn Bracken) of a doctor (Gwilym Lee) at the nearby asylum is murdered by one of her husband’s escaped patients — at least, that’s what we’re told. Later, the doctor shows up at a curio shop run by his wife’s blind twin sister (also Bracken), who tells him every item in the store is cursed. Eventually, the sister shows up at the house for a surprise visit, bringing with her a huge trunk with a presumably cursed mannequin” inside — except it’s more like a hand-carved wooden golem in permanent mid-scream, which is then seated at the house’s dining room table without much ado. No one seems to think it’s odd, not even the doctor’s new and ultra-cynical girlfriend (Caroline Menton), who just sneers. The blind sister, we learn, has an agenda: Possessing psychometry and thereby knowing for certain that the blamed inmate was innocent, she’s bent on avenging her sister by way of her witchy abilities and, perhaps, the infrequently glimpsed ghost of the dead woman.

That’s just the set-up. McCarthy is throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall, however deftly, and you can feel like you’re being asked to swallow an awful lot of ookiness. The story’s unfolding from there has plenty of rewinds and flashbacks and gotchas, but its genre-ness hews closest to the comeuppance-dishing yarns of Tales of the Crypt (the old EC comics, not the HBO series), a dated paradigm that makes McCarthy’s film feel almost like pastiche. 

McCarthy loves the old stuff — even the obsolete mental hospital looks like it could be from a Lovecraft adaptation. The screenplay, burdened by so many weirdly particular givens, indexes no larger ideas, and the unsorted pile of genre-stuff — the psychic blind twin, the did-it-move golem, the maybe-ghost, the one-eyed soothsaying lunatic, the bloody corpse he finds, the spirit-summoning desk bell, the slowly unveiled murder plot’s tendrils, the sadistic orderly, etc. — come off almost as random; you could throw in a mummy.

But so? Oddity all but wallows in unmodern Gothic cliches for their own sake, and that can be its own goosey pleasure as well. For his part, McCarthy is polished and committed, even if his cast sometimes isn’t — Lee’s ultra-bland doctor is soap-opera fake, and his exasperated straight-man cry of ghosts and nonsense!” could be the film’s trailer money shot.

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