Late night horror screenings are one of my favourite things about MIFF.  

I nearly passed up on tonight’s film because it had been a long day but the film beforehand finished about one minute before Oddity started and so, along with at least one other person, I sprinted across Flinders Street and got into my seat within a few minutes of the film starting.

Psychiatrist Ted Timmins (Gwilym Lee who was Brian May in Bohemian Rhapsody and Ned in Top End Wedding) works at a psychiatric institution, so you know that’s going to be mined for scares. He and his wife Dani (Caroline Bracken who you might recognise from The Quiet Girl) have just purchased a big old stone house a long way from anywhere (you can see where this is going).

Dani is there alone one dark and stormy night while Ted works nightshift and one of his recently released patients Declan (Johnny French) turns up at her door and faces her with a terrible choice. He looks like a deranged madman but he says that he saw someone going in to her house and she needs to come out to him. 

It’s a great premise as anyone can imagine how you would be paralysed with having to try and determine where the danger actually is. And what can be worse than the danger being inside your home. It’s probably not much of a spoiler to say that things don’t end well for Dani but she has an identical twin sister Darcy (also played by Bracken) who is a psychic. She sets out to find out who killed her sister and avenge her death.

The tropes continue – there’s a big wooden golem, Darcy is blind but can ’see’ what others can’t, there’s an unbelieving girlfriend, there’s no phone service. It’s full of great jump scares and genuinely creepy scenes and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The acting is sometimes hammy but it kind of fits with the retro horror vibes, as does the relative predictability of the denouement.

By the end I was hiding behind my shawl just waiting for the scary climax. It was worth it but then I had to walk home alone through the empty Melbourne streets, thinking happy thoughts.