“Kneecap” and “Oddity” Both Hit Their Mark

There are two films out at the moment both of which are sur­pris­ing­ly watch­able. First up is Odd­i­ty, an Irish hor­ror film.

I’m very much not a hor­ror fan and our abil­i­ty to pro­duce com­pe­tent­ly made low bud­get genre films here in Ire­land is, with­out putting too fine a point on it, uncon­vinc­ing. So I seat­ed myself on the aisle, con­fi­dent that I’d be leav­ing after about twen­ty minutes. 

What a plea­sure to be proved so thor­ough­ly wrong. As its writer direc­tor Dami­an McCarthy is the first to admit, it makes no attempt at break­ing the mould and is quite con­tent to rely on the usu­al assort­ment of well-worn tropes and types. 

A women is on her own in a large, sprawl­ing house in the mid­dle of nowhere, and when she goes back inside from the pitch dark­ness after retriev­ing some­thing from her car, there’s a loud knock at the door. 

It’s a man who has, he tells her, just escaped from a lunatic asy­lum, and he’s come to warn her that while she was in her car, he saw some­one enter her house. That man is in there now!! All she has to do is let this wide-eyed lunatic in, and he’ll go in, find him and save her. 

What’s she to do?

For once, the fact that there’s so lit­tle that’s orig­i­nal about the film is exact­ly what makes it so enjoy­able. Odd­i­ty hits each of the age old marks just so, so that the brief bursts of gen­uine if mild anx­i­ety are imme­di­ate­ly tem­pered by know­ing recog­ni­tion. Deliv­er­ing just the right mix of sus­pense, the super­nat­ur­al and pure hokum. 

Tight­ly script­ed, well-act­ed and with excel­lent use of sound, Odd­i­ty is one of the few films it’s worth both­er­ing going out to the cin­e­ma for this summer. 

My expec­ta­tions around Kneecap were even low­er, and I plant­ed myself in the aisle seat of the front row, expect­ing to remain there for no more than 8 or 9 min­utes. Once again, how nice to be proved wrong. 

Instead of the usu­al suc­ces­sion of unfun­ny skits per­formed by embar­rass­ing­ly wood­en pop pup­pets in a film con­spic­u­ous­ly devoid of any­thing approx­i­mat­ing an actu­al plot, Kneecap boasts impres­sive per­for­mances from one and all. And not just from Michael Fass­ben­der, whose gen­er­ous par­tic­i­pa­tion must have helped con­sid­er­ably in get­ting the project off the ground. 

Kneecap are, osten­si­bly, a hip-hop trio from Belfast on a mis­sion to spread the word on the Irish lan­guage. Impres­sive­ly, all three offer up pol­ished and at times even sub­tle per­for­mances that sug­gest their future is more like­ly to be on a sound stage than in the record­ing stu­dio. And the film is pro­pelled by pacey direc­tion in a con­fi­dent­ly plot­ted sto­ry that expert­ly fields its pol­i­tics with informed aplomb. 

It’s instant­ly dis­pos­able of course, and no one’s going to be lis­ten­ing to that kind of sub-Beast­ie Boys music in 12 months’ time, but the film deliv­ers an instant hit with incred­i­ble ener­gy and gen­uine humour. And so long as you go in with appro­pri­ate­ly low expec­ta­tions, you’ll be as pleas­ant­ly sur­prised as I was. In short, it’s a riot. 

Odd­i­ty won an audi­ence award at this year’s SXSW and Kneecap did the same thing at this year’s Sun­dance. You can see the trail­er for Odd­i­ty here:

And the trail­er for Kneecap here:

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