[Herald Interview] 'Oldboy' to 'Oddity': Tense cinema is universal

The Irish director of horror suspense film “Oddity,” Damian McCarthy has informed his work with an appreciation for Korean cinema.

“I think of Choi Min-sik when he just has explosive temper at the end of ‘Oldboy’ or anything Song Kang-ho has done, it just ... this guy's just incredible,” he said at the start of an interview with The Korea Herald, hours before attending the awards ceremony where his film was in the international feature competition at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, or BIFAN, in July.

“They've got subtitles obviously, but you kind of don't even need to know what they're saying, the way they get things across.”

McCarthy’s sophomore feature film, “Oddity,” is a paranormal thriller set in a moodily lit home in the Irish countryside playing on fears of the strange and the unknown amplified in isolation. It begins with an apparent home invasion and murder inconveniently just outside the frame, before skipping ahead to a year later when the murdered woman’s blind psychic twin sister returns to the scene looking for answers.

In contrast to some of the Korean films he appreciates, the director said, “The films I make, they have such little violence in them, or else it's kind of suggested.”

He noted that when preparing for a new film, he revisits Bong Joon-ho’s “Memories of Murder” just to study the expert framing: “very subtle blocking and very subtle movements of the camera ― it's brilliant.”

Along with setting the mood through lighting and framing, McCarthy explained that he tried to avoid technology as much as he could to create a feeling of an old ghost story.

While presented in a cohesive 98-minute narrative, if the film sometimes seems like a mashup of different spooky stories and horrific ideas ― it is.

“It was just all these different scenes that I really liked but they all felt like they belonged in a different genre,” the director explained. “One was definitely like a ghost story. One felt like a slasher movie or a home invasion, a little bit of mystery, bit of psychological horror.”

McCarthy’s debut feature film, “Caveat,” was also in competition at BIFAN in 2021, though the director was unable to attend amid the pandemic restrictions at the time, and the film was released in theaters here that fall. The film similarly was set in an isolated locale and dealt with psychological themes.

“Anything paranormal or supernatural; I do like a good claustrophobic horror that's set inside a house with just a couple of characters,” the director confirmed, speaking about what interests him.

“The people who are presented as the madman or the crazy guys ― they turn out to be the people who are telling the truth and are actually trying to do the right thing," he said.

“Oddity” released in 790 theaters across the US this summer and was met with overwhelmingly positive reviews. While the date for its wide theatrical release in Korea has not yet been confirmed, it was released physically on Blu-ray on Tuesday.