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# Oddities is an odd delight
- URL: https://regionfree.net/oddities-festival-review-night-visions/
- Published: 2026-11-11T07:31:48.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-11T07:31:48.000Z
- Description: A freewheeling genre-bending delight that is scary as it is outlandish, Oddities is perhaps a little too much of everything, but it's hard to remain unimpressed when the results are this much fun.
- Author: Joonatan Itkonen
- Tags: Festivals, Night Visions, Film & TV, #filmreview, #score-4

Written and directed by Tyler Savage, Oddities is a genre-bending smorgasbord of ideas, influences, and twists that occasionally teeters into excess but mostly astonishes and delights in equal measure. 

Propelled by a fantastic leading trio of performances from Lilimar, Lovie Simone, and Adrienne Barbeau, Oddities begins as a girls-on-the-run caper, transforms into a relative of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, before flirting with something far more Lovecraftian in the end. If that sounds messy, it's because it is, but you'll never be bored, and that alone makes the trip worthwhile.

Lilimar and Simone play doomed runaways who haven't yet made a bad decision they didn't fall for. The first act, where the duo goes from understandable to tragically shortsighted actions within minutes, is brutally effective at getting us to like them, even when we disagree with them. Savage's tight script gracefully skips the usual pleasantries and tropes, launching every genre convention into orbit the moment they're introduced. At first, I tried to keep tabs on which gear we'd shifted into, only to realize part of the fun is looking up and not recognizing the landscape. 

By the time the girls roll into Betty's (Barbeau) antique store of knick-knacks and oddities, the air is heavy with unease. We know that, given the chance, our anti-heroes will devour each other, and Savage sets up a myriad of potential powder kegs along the route, giving the film a demented, Rube Goldbergian structure where every twist activates another. It's breathless and inventive, even if it runs perhaps a couple of laps too long by the end. 

But for the longest time, Savage and his cast keep the atmosphere so playful, so deliciously unexpected, that even the excess feels worthwhile. The wonderful soundtrack by Cody Carpenter toys with recreations of Tobe Hooper's score from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre before leaping into a fully synth audioscape that plays like the inside of an oddities store come to life. 

For a film with chopped-off limbs, chases, and more squibs than you can shake a stick at, part of the great fun in Oddities is how much restraint it shows at every turn. Push any sound cue or performance too far, and you risk turning everything to pantomime, which would rob the terror of its power. Savage and his team have a fantastic handle on how much is too much, and there's no greater showcase of that than the wonderful performance from Barbeau, which effortlessly waltzes between manic and underplayed menace, often within a single scene. 

Watch, for example, how quickly she goes from zero to sixty and her practised country smile takes on an edge, as if barely concealing an innate rage tempered by decades of masking. It's a great, nuanced performance that's funny because it's scary and vice versa, and that's remarkably hard to pull off. 

At a brisk 90 minutes, Oddities only slightly overstays its welcome, and one could argue it earns the right to an extended victory lap. I think the first half is stronger than the second, but part of that is down to the joy of the undiscovered country. The answers don't always make sense, and some of them aren't even necessary, but it's hard to pick at them when the presentation is this much fun.

As with any good horror story, especially ones dealing with southern gothics and the threat of the unknown, Oddities plays its hand with an admirable confidence. Even if the tune is familiar, the players make it sound fresh all the same.