The director of Shudder's new terrifying horror film Oddity broke down its ending and explained what it all meant while sharing the real fate of the movie's big bad.
The film follows Carolyn Backen's Darcy, a blind medium and shopkeeper of various artifacts and trinkets, who comes to realize that there was more to the death of her twin sister, Dani, a year earlier.
To find the answer she seeks, she employs her mysterious ways and an endlessly creepy wooden mannequin to figure out the truth behind it all. This leads her to show up at the house of Darcy's husband (Gwilym Lee) and his new girlfriend, Yana (Caroline Menton), which initiates an intensely uncomfortable game of cat and mouse throughout the movie's runtime.
Oddity Director Explains Movie's Ending, Reveals Ted's True Fate
In an exclusive interview with The Direct's Russ Milheim, Oddity director and writer Damian Mc Carthy sat down to help break down the film's twisty ending and what exactly the fate of the big bad ended up being.
During the climax of the film, Carolyn Backen's Darcy exposes the truth of what Gwilym Lee's Ted did: he ordered the death of his late wife, Dani.
As for why Ted would do such a thing, he did not want to break Dani's heart by leaving her for Caroline Menton's Yana. He truly believed she would never be able to move on.
So, he had his associate in the mental institution, Ivan (Steve Wall), go and brutally kill her while she was trapped in her makeshift tent in the living area of Ted's work-in-progress house (which means quite literally everything to him, as he was afraid of losing it as well).
Mc Carthy explained how "it felt like that classic mystery of it's the husband," which is what made Ted the perfect choice, with the filmmaker adding how "narratively it felt it was always going to be him as I was writing the script:"
"There's a lot of red herrings in it. But that's, you know, it should obviously be this guy; it should obviously be that guy. It felt like that classic mystery of, it's the husband; the husband is always the killer and doing these things. So it just felt like the right choice. Now. There are so many suspects in it. It just seemed like that. When you watch it on second view, Ted is clearly a very detached person. There's something very, very wrong with him. Yeah, just narratively, it felt it was always going to be him as I was writing the script."
Sadly, despite the revelation of Ted's true actions, he seems to get away with it.
Not only does Ted concoct a sinister plan that tricks Darcy into falling through a trap door (which she didn't see on account of her blindness) to her eventual death, shortly after she admits that she knows what he did, but he also manages to escape the house and send his goon to finish her off, Steve Wall's Ivan.
Ivan is also revealed to have been the one who killed Darcy off-screen at the beginning of the movie.
Originally, Darcy thought Tadhg Murphy's one-eyed inmate, Olin Boole, did the deed. She even went as far as to possess her wooden mannequin to kill the poor innocent man–something she manages to do one more time to kill Ivan.
Despite all of that, Ted seemingly makes it out of it all unscathed. That is until the ominous bell from early in the movie shows up.
The trinket was first introduced at Darcy's shop, where she tells Ted that everyone who has ever rung it has ended up dead. Of course, Ted did not believe it then, and he does not now–so it is a theory he tests.
"It's just his own arrogance [that] led to his demise," Mc Carthy admitted
"It's just his own arrogance [that] led to his demise. I mean that character is surrounded by people the whole way through the film telling him things that they see. He doesn't believe anything. And if he does know that somebody is telling the truth, he's gaslighting and telling them, 'No, that never happened.' I think that by the time you get to the end of the film, he's heard so many ghost stories that he's got to see it for himself."
Mc Carthy then confirmed how he "like[s] to think [Ted's] definitely dead" and that audiences would have seen "the bellboy tear him apart" if the film "were another 40 seconds long:"
"[Ted's] got to prove that he really does not believe in this stuff to the point where he kind of risk--he's gotten away with it. He's gotten away with everything; he just can't help himself. So, I like to think he's definitely dead. If the film were another 40 seconds long, maybe we'd see the bellboy tear him apart."
But did Ted think he would get away with it?
"He gets very close," the director admitted, adding how he probably felt that "[having] Ivan in his back pocket" was going to the winning play:
"He gets very close. I suppose it's just because--I always feel like he always had that backup, but he also had Ivan in his back pocket anyway. I mean, there was more in the script. There was a little bit more we shot going into Ivan's backstory. He had been a former patient of Ted's. Ted has released him with the intention of [having] a handy thing to have this very violent instrument around, but If I ever need anything taken care of, I can get him to do it but then pin it on him. And I'm also his doctor. So he's quite an easy guy to get to go along with these things."
The director jestfully brought up how he's "gotten messages from people that hated the character so much" who were really hoping that he died:
"I have gotten messages from people that hated the character so much. [They were like], 'I just need to know that he hasn't gotten away with this. He does die right?' Oh, yeah, he's gone. Although who knows? Ted is such a bad guy, maybe he convinced the bellboy to move in with him and then they became friends."
As for Darcy, whose last act in the movie is to get her wooden mannequin (which Ted eventually burns down) to kill Ivan, Mc Carthy shared that he "think[s] she's gone," adding how he likes to burn as many bridges as he can, making any potential hypothetical sequel impossible or extremely difficult to approach:
"I think she's gone. For any script I write, I try to destroy as much of the world's story as I can. Kill all the characters and burn the house down. Even the wooden man is burnt in the end... There's no real way to make [a sequel]... Cross that bridge, which is the script, and then just burn it. Who knows? There are lots of ghosts in the movie, so people can always find a way to come back. But I do like I do, like films that are kind of one and done. The whole story is told, and you're finished. And that's all there can ever be of it."
Oddity is now streaming on Shudder.
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