It’s hard to think of a cinematic image in recent memory that’s more aggressively unsettling than that of the wooden man in Damian McCarthy’s Oddity. Sitting pretty at the dinner table, polished palms flush with reflective lumber, mouth eternally agape, his strained blank eyes stare openly at nothing. “I had my own ideas of what he’d look like,” recalls director McCarthy about dreaming up his eerily lifelike inanimate object. “I always knew it was going to have this wooden look to him, and that his design would always be frozen in this silent scream.”
In the movie, when Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is brutally murdered in the home she and her doctor husband Ted Timmis (Gwilym Lee) are renovating, everyone blames a local mental patient who had been under the physician’s care at the institution. However, soon after the incident, the patient himself becomes a victim in another bizarre crime. A year later to the date, Dani’s blind twin sister Darcy (also Carolyn Bracken), a self-proclaimed psychic and oddities store owner, takes it upon herself to discover the truth about her sibling’s untimely death and use the cursed objects in her possession as means of exacting revenge on whoever really had a hand in her sister’s demise.
When Darcy pays an unexpected visit to her former brother-in-law’s home, he and his current girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton) are anything but pleased, yet given the tragic anniversary, allow Darcy to stick around. But Darcy’s not alone. At her side is a large antique trunk, and squeezed inside is a life-size wooden mannequin passed on by her mother, supposedly fabricated by a real witch. Explains McCarthy, “He has holes in the back of his head that have a lock of hair, and a photograph and a vial of blood, and I find a lot of that is just completely left open to the audience’s imagination.”
Concerning the actual craftsmanship of the wooden figure, McCarthy found he was extremely pressed for time, and worked tirelessly with designer Paul McDonnell to forge a man from fallen timber. “We’d such little time to design it, it was pretty much doing it live,” laughs McCarthy. “I had to sit in on Zoom with him and watch Paul sculpt it in real-time. I might say, ‘Oh, let’s change the shape of the face, change the shape of the nose, the ears,’ and it was just hours of this. We had one go at it, and then it had to go straight into molding. And it had to fit our Ivan (Steve Wall), who played the wooden man.”
Looking back on his circumstances now, the director recognizes that being pushed to accomplish so much in so little time procured surprising rewards. “I can’t imagine if we’d had six months to design and build this thing, if it had been any better. Maybe it worked because it has to all come from good feelings and years of watching horror movies and figuring it out in real-time, what’s working and what’s not.”
Influenced by his own collection, McCarthy admits he snuck a few Easter eggs into his sophomore feature from the projects he directed previously. “At the back of Darcy’s showroom, I have a lot of objects there that I’ve collected over the years. So if anybody has seen my short films, they could probably recognize some of the stuff on her shelf.”
A fan of quaint old shops buried in the tall grass of small towns himself, one has to wonder if the souvenirs this filmmaker has obtained actually do carry with them a hidden spirit or two. “I wouldn’t say they’re haunted,” McCarthy teases, “There’s a lot of history surrounding them. Some of the stuff was quite creepy.”
Casting a lead to center a story around is always challenging for a filmmaker, but finding someone who can embody two distinctly different identical twins in the same person is akin to seeking the perfect ballerina to dance both parts in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. “One of the original ideas was when he first finds her inside that old antique shop, she almost looks like a ballerina inside in an old music box,” McCarthy remembers of Ted and Darcy’s reunion on the anniversary of her sister’s death. “I mean, she’s clearly in her world. She belongs inside there.”
When tasked with locating an actor who could play both twins in his movie, McCarthy saw something special in Carolyn Bracken. “It did feel like working with two different actresses,” McCarthy chuckles with a twinkle in his eye. “I mean, [Bracken] would come in on a day with Dani, and you’d see she felt lighter, and she seemed in better form. It’s just very odd. And then she’d come in with Darcy, and of course, it’s usually a heavier day, because Darcy’s got so much on her mind and she’s out for revenge and she’s got all this going on. I’m not saying she was a method actor by any means, but you can tell that it’s a different headspace that she’s in, which is very interesting to watch.”
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus, The Great Gatsby, an oculist’s billboard features the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg peering out from behind gigantic yellow spectacles over a valley of ashes. Large, looming and all-seeing, they symbolize the eyes of God, casting judgment like a deity over his desolate surroundings. In Alfred Hitchcock’s highly influential and often misunderstood 1945 classic black and white film Spellbound, a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali illustrates a psychoanalytical night terror in which the subject is analyzed and critiqued according to ravenous standards. So, too, do eyes take on a type of symbolic nature in McCarthy’s latest effort, using the recurring motif throughout the picture, from its blind leading lady, to etched-out irises on a masked assassin, to a glass eye proving its significance – even the standing lights and paintings in the haunted renovated home lend to the idea that everyone inside is always being observed by an entity of some kind.
“It’s a glass eye, that is essentially what kicks off the whole story,” muses McCarthy, “And it is what allows a blind woman to see what happened.” Although, the director admits the iconography was seemingly subconscious, authentically sprinkled in, unbeknownst to even himself. “I could offer takes on Darcy’s blind lady justice … or Ivan’s fears that God is always watching … but as the motif was unintentional, on a conscious level at least, it’s best left open to interpretation.”
Born Catholic in a small rural Irish community, McCarthy returned to his hometown of Bantry in West Cork, Ireland to shoot this story in the same place that gave him nightmares as a child. The result is visceral.
“I always wanted the film to have an old ghost story feel to it. A lot of deep shadows, and have that warm lantern light feel. Our location was perfect for that because we have so many dark corners and long hallways. We’ve got two levels, lots of empty doorways. Any time the camera lingers, we’re letting an audience fill in that space themselves.”
Aside from the geographical advantage, McCarthy also relies on memories of hanging out in the video store his parents ran while he was growing up to influence his filmmaking. To this lifelong horror movie fan, the most important thing about crafting a story is subverting expectations. “I’m gonna weaponize what the audience thinks they know about horror films,” smiles McCarthy. “They’re gonna try to predict how I’m going to scare them. But I’m gonna use that against them.”
The director goes on to explain how even the wooden man was impacted by his surroundings. “The design of him was written for the location. I always knew that he would have to stand out in that location. You also almost have to feel out of place. I mean, the design of the house, and the production side that went into it. It was always intentional to have that cold masculine leather and steel, like your typical psychiatrist or psychotherapist office. It’s almost like Ted’s work is really his home life as well. But then in the middle of this thing, to sit something that’s built by a witch – it’s completely out of place in the house. That was always, in terms of the early ideas, for the look and design of it.”
After winning the Midnighter Audience Award at the SXSW Film & TV Festival, the Audience Award for Best Feature at the Overlook Film Festival, and having recently been spotted in New York City, the surrogate sitter has certainly been making the rounds. Only one question remains: where is the wooden man now?
“He’s been traveling a lot,” reflects director McCarthy, missing his mute monster. “Usually he was sitting behind me in my office for six months. I’d be writing, and every now and again you turn back and he’s just sitting there with his mouth open.”
By R.C. Baker , www.villagevoice.com , a-e-d,FILM ,
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2024-07-16 20:47:10 , The Village Voice , Director Damian McCarthy on His ‘Oddity’