Damian McCarthy

Damian McCarthy is an Irish writer-director whose feature films Caveat (2020) and Oddity (2024) place tightly controlled supernatural mysteries in isolated Irish settings. Caveat, his first feature, follows Isaac, a drifter played by Jonathan French, who accepts a job watching Olga (Leila Sykes) at a remote house. The arrangement is deliberately alarming: Isaac must wear a leather harness and chain himself to the building while Olga can move freely through the house. Ben Caplan plays Barret, the man who offers Isaac the work, and the story gradually connects the house, Olga’s family, and a murder. The film uses a wind-up toy rabbit and a blindfolded mother among its recurring images. McCarthy wrote and directed Caveat. His second feature, Oddity, premiered in the Midnighters section of SXSW in 2024. It won the festival’s Midnighters Audience Award. Carolyn Bracken plays both Dani and Darcy; Dani is murdered at the country home she shares with her husband Ted (Gwilym Lee), while Darcy, her blind twin sister and a medium, arrives to confront him. The investigation involves a life-sized wooden mannequin and a glass eye, objects that turn the film’s revenge narrative toward occult horror. Tadhg Murphy plays Olin, a former patient of Ted, and Caroline Menton plays Yana, the new woman in Ted’s life. Oddity was released theatrically in the United States by IFC Films on July 19, 2024, before arriving on Shudder on September 27. McCarthy again wrote and directed the film. Its principal setting is the renovated country house where Dani’s death occurred, and its central prop, a wooden figure purchased by Darcy, is not merely decoration but an instrument in her attempt to expose what happened. The title refers to the shop of curiosities that Darcy operates, which supplies several of the film’s uncanny objects. In the opening, Dani is visited at night by a man she has been told is a dangerous former psychiatric patient; this encounter establishes the crime that Darcy later tries to solve. Before making features, McCarthy directed short films including He Dies at the End, Hungry Hickory, How Olin Lost His Eye, and Never Ever Open It. These titles show his earlier interest in macabre premises, but Caveat and Oddity are the works on which his feature-length reputation chiefly rests. This progression from short films to two scripted feature mysteries makes McCarthy’s career identifiable through a consistent body of independently made Irish horror cinema. Both are built around specific haunted domestic spaces.