Oddities (Grimmfest 2026)

I originally saw Oddities on the fifth day of FrightFest in a press screening room where everyone was exhausted. For any movie, I don’t think that is the most conducive environment – movies need to breathe – and with writer/director Tyler Savage’s (Stalker, 2020) new movie getting its Northern Premiere at Manchester’s Grimmfest, what better time to give the movie a fair shake than now? This is especially valid when the movie is the sort that feels fundamentally different on first and second viewing.

The movie opens on the sort of scene where it shows the ending before rewinding a few days to show how we got there, a trite trope but as the saying goes, “don’t hate the player, hate the game”. As events begin, we follow best friends and flatmates Lilimar and Lovie Simone, and it’s the prior’s birthday. As we learn, she has both a fractious relationship with her brother (and particularly his life partner, and her bob haircut) and has had her struggles with drugs. Her friend doesn’t make this any easier by taking her to a party at a trap house co-hosted by the want-away dealer she is sleeping with, and as expected, that ends about as well as can be expected with the former dealer ending up dead – but not before he plants a brick of cocaine in the boot of the friends car. So, with no money, a death on their hands and nowhere to go, they go on the run from the owner of the brick. With a police car (driven by Will Oldham – pop screen podcast says hello) in close pursuit, they eventually find refuge in an antiques shop hosted in a barn run by Adrienne Barbeau. Being desperate and daring, it’s not long before Barbeau’s previously friendly façade is washed away, causing the pair to be imprisoned and made part of something far bigger than either of them would dare dream.

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Here’s where watching Oddities twice becomes both interesting and relevant. On an admittedly knackered first viewing, it was apparent that Lilimar and Simone are victims – both of their own bad choices and the captivity that they are placed under by the duplicitous Barbeau and her “neanderthal nephew” Gunner Willis (who feels too grounded in character motivation rather than on screen action). And while probably still true on the second viewing too, it introduces a new wrinkle of knowing why their captors are doing what they are doing, and it comes from a place of desperation, fatigue and necessity. While it doesn’t change the mechanics of the piece from being about a cultish group believing that they need to sacrifice the undeserving, it does add an interesting shade of grey to things. What it is more proactive in changing is the behaviour of a certain character after we see the proverbial hitting the fan. How a character responds – in fact, how all characters respond – is nothing shy of erratic, feeling more like a need for a violent resolution than a fitting end for these characters’ stories. But there are worse sins for a movie to commit in the genre space than finishing on a violent flourish… far, far worse.

There are two facets that help Oddities no end, and show a real levelling up from the low-key and contained Stalker that Savage directed previously, and that is performance and production design. The barn-based antiques shop is an absolute joy of design; much of their stock is implied to come from victims, which offers a layer of environmental and contextual storytelling that adds a huge level of background detail that the script would be impossible to detail. Furthermore, it’s such a characterful and handsome space, the movie feels like it is firing on all cylinders whenever events take place there. Same too for the little bits of lore and art scattered through the antiques shop and the other properties the movie spends time in. Performances are of a similarly high standard; the chemistry and energetic dialogue elevate the whole project, and that’s before discussing the raw emotional edge all the actors present in their performances. Particular plaudits need to be spent on Barbeau and a late appearance from Xander Berkeley, but the real star is the fire, as Barbeau’s character puts it, of Simone and Lilimar’s characters, as without that verve the characters just wouldn’t feel as lived in – and as the strength of the environmental storytelling suggests, Oddities is at its best when it feels larger than the confines of the movie.

Oddities is a well-lensed, thoughtfully considered and even better acted piece from Tyler Savage, and it shows real growth for the writer/director. Like any movie, there are peaks and troughs, yet, the concept is very well worn and while there may be no original ideas left, only original treatments, it’s still hard on any given movie to feel overly familiar to the point of feeling like you’ve watched it before (and sure, I have, but it felt this way back at FrightFest too). But even as I say this, mileage will naturally vary depending on how often you’ve seen something that sets out a similar stall to what Tyler Savage does here, and it just so happens I’ve seen it a lot yet I don’t want to leave you on a downer, especially when Oddities does itself a lot of favours by being so fun to spend 90 minutes in its company.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – ODDITIES

WATCH OUR INTERVIEW WITH LILIMAR HERE