Oddities (2026) Review

To say that Oddities throws a curve ball or two is an understatement. Tyler Savage’s horror starts as a grubby crime thriller, veers into backwoods captivity territory and then, with very little warning, decides it would quite like to become a creature feature too. By rights, it should feel like three films fighting over the same ninety-ish minutes. Somehow, most of the time, it works.

Rose (Lilimar) and Makenna (Lovie Simone) are best friends whose lives currently revolve around getting high, making bad decisions and helping each other survive the consequences. When a night with their dealer ends with a body on the floor, they flee in his car, unaware that the boot contains enough drugs to make several unpleasant people with guns interested in finding them.

Their panicked escape takes them to a roadside antique shop run by Betty, played by horror aristocracy Adrienne Barbeau, who emerges with a smiling menace that makes her politeness feel somehow threatening. At first, Betty appears to offer refuge. There is warmth, concern, maybe even a hint of grandmotherly reassurance. Naturally though, this doesn’t last.

Savage, expanding his own 2023 short film, gets a lot of mileage from the antique shop itself. It’s exactly the kind of place horror ought to love. There are crowded shelves, dusty objects, things with histories nobody has bothered to explain. Every corner looks capable of hiding either a bargain, a killer or a curse. And to add to the atmosphere, Cody Carpenter’s score adds an appropriately retro pulse without ever shouting over the action.

The performances keep the film on track when the other aspects begin to wobble. Lilimar makes Rose abrasive without losing the viewer’s sympathy, giving her enough bruised determination to suggest that her self-destruction is partly armour. Simone is warmer as Makenna, and their friendship feels convincing because it includes irritation and loyalty. These are two people who clearly love one another, even if they are particularly good at making each other’s lives worse.

Then, of course, there is Adreinne Barbeau.

More than forty years after The Fog, she commands the spotlight, making a room feel dangerous by standing in it. Betty isn’t played as an obvious monster, and the pleasure lies in watching her kindly façade gradually slip, a sweet smile lingering just a fraction too long before something worse appears underneath. Here, Savage gives Barbeau an actual role rather than the glorified cameo horror veterans are sometimes handed, and she makes the most of it.

Unfortunately, the middle stretch of the film does become repetitive and a little too familiar. Talk of an unfathomable justification for the kidnap of the girls, becomes frustrating. This is followed by escape, recapture, another threat, another attempt and there are moments when the cat-and-mouse rhythm starts to feel more procedural than suspenseful – as if the film is circling the ending waiting for permission to move on. But when it does, is when Oddities earns its title.

Without giving too much away, Savage pushes the final act into much stranger territory, pulling religious mania, trauma and something altogether larger into the same room. The shift is audacious enough to be enjoyable even when the effects begin to expose the limitations of the budget. Some of the digital work lacks weight, but the ambition behind it is difficult to begrudge.

That tonal leap will divide people. Those enjoying the nastier, more contained survival story may wonder whether they have wandered into another screening. Others will be delighted that Savage refuses to leave well enough alone.

Oddities is rough around the edges, occasionally overstuffed and far more confident than tidy. But it has energy, personality and the good sense to give Adrienne Barbeau something genuinely wicked to do. What starts as a familiar tale of bad people stumbling into worse company eventually grows into something stranger, messier and more memorable.

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