Odd Bell

I have been sort of shortchanging Ms. Spenser on horror, so I thought I'd make an effort. Then I just grabbed Oddity (2024) off the shelf at the library. But it worked out.

We start with Carolyn Bracken, renovating a magnificent little antique stables. She finds one corner with cell phne bars and says, "We're connected!" (I missed the phone, and thought it was a philosophical comment. I was part right.) She talks to her husband, Gwilym Lee, a rather cold doctor at a mental institution, telling him she'll be there all night. She has a tent set up in the middle of an empty space.

A pounding comes at the door - she sees a horrible face with a milky eye through the peephole. He says he has seen a man come in, and tells her she is in trouble. He begs her to let her in, but she refuses, so he says he will run to find help. Shortly after this, she is murdered horribly in her tent.

Some time later, Lee has a new girlfriend, Caroline Menton, who doesn't much like staying at the stables. She asks him to invite his murdered wife's twin sister for a visit, as a gesture. He visits her at her odd curio shop. She is played by Carolyn Bracken again, a blind woman. She tells him that all the items in her shop are cursed in some way. He gives her the milky glass eye that belonged to the madman who presumably murdered her sister, said madman having been horribly killed at the institution.

She arrives with a house-warming gift, a kind of mummy mannequin, a life-sized wooden man. She also brings them a haunted call bell - ringing it brings a ghost bellboy. She explains that she can read the past of items like this through psychometry (don't think she actually says psychometry). After Lee leaves for his night shift at the institution, his girlfriend is stuck with Bracken. She seems inclined to stay, and everyone is too polite to outright kick her out. After awkwardness turns to terror, Menton wisely takes off.

Then Lee manages to kill Bracken remotely.

There's so much great about this movie. First, the stables - I'd live there, no matter how haunted. Then the game of wits between blind, beautiful Bracken and cold, calculating Lee. The comedy of manners when Bracken comes to visit and won't leave is cute, then gets very scary. The cursed objects are a little cheesy - the big wooden man was more WTF than OMG. The haunted bell seems almost silly. So, beauty, a little comedy, some twists, and a lot of scares. Ms. Spenser liked it.