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At first glance, director Mike Flanagan's OCULUS looks like a pretty standard haunted house-type film. A young man and woman, brother and sister, revisit their childhood home where they believe a mirror is responsible for the deaths of their parents. That does sound like pretty standard fare. But once Flanagan, his stars Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff, Rory Cochrane, and co-screenwriter Jeff Howard get the story kicked off, all your preconceptions are thrown out the window with clever, creepy direction and editing, a really smart and moody script and some excellent and brave performances.
Kaylie and Tim Russell (played as adults by Gillan and Thwaites, and as children by Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan respectively)had a very normal childhood, until their father Alan (Cochrane), with the support of his loving wife Marie (Sackhoff), starts his own software business out of his home office where they have a lovely antique mirror placed. Things are normal enough for a bit, but suddenly, all hell breaks loose; Alan murders Marie and Tim is placed in a psychiatric ward after he shot Alan. The film opens just as Tim is being released on his 21st birthday and seems to have completely recovered from his trauma, believing that everything that happened were tragic acts of desperate and delusional people rather than there being any supernatural phenomena. However, Kaylie has grown into her adulthood and still is firmly convinced that the mirror, an antique known as the Lasser Glass, is not only the cause of the murders in their home, but of many others throughout time. Through her work at an antiques auction house, she is able to abscond with the mirror and bring it and Tim to their childhood home with the intention of initially proving it has supernatural powers, but also to destroy it. Brother and sister are initially in conflict as Kaylie desperately tries to tear down the psychic walls Tim has built up for himself to guide him through his childhood trauma, and Tim desperately tries to convince Kaylie that everything that happened had a rational explanation despite how horrific it all was. And soon, the mirror does indeed start fighting back against their attempts to weaken it, and once again, their childhood home is filled with terrors.
Again, even the description I just gave seems pretty rudimentary and feels like well-covered territory. What really makes it work is how Flanagan disrupts the viewers by shifting back and forth in time to the past and present, and as the film reaches its climax, how the two time periods begin to collide. Not only is it an incredibly effective storytelling technique, it's a very disorienting bit of cinematic trickery that throws the audience off their center, and it becomes hard to know what exactly might be going on. Now this technique has been the source of some complaint about this film, but that's expected. Once you tread off the beaten path of the horror genre, some fans become irate because all of their sweet spots weren't hit. But that disorientation is part of the whole experience. The filmmakers are trying to replicate the experiences of the protagonists in the viewer's mind as well. How can we be expected to always know what's happening if the characters we're following don't always know what's happening? It is purposefully confusing and that works to the film's advantage rather than a detriment. Story-wise, there are some plot points that are extremely nit-picky (When did she get all this equipment installed? Has she been working at the auction house just to get access to the Lasser Glass? How has she been able to do this without her fiance's knowledge?), but it's very negligable.
While Gillen and Cochrane stand out amongst the adults, the real show-stealers are Basso and Ryan as the young Kaylie and Tim. They're marvelous and incredibly brave young performers that hopefully have a strong future ahead of them. Also standing out is Flanagan, who made some rumbles with his 2011 horror ABSENTIA, has really crafted a new take on a very old horror trope of the cursed or haunted object. Wisely, he also doesn't overdo it with CGI creep. There are certainly some well-crafted CG effects here, but for the most part, it's shot using good old-fashioned practical effects, which seem to be making something of a comeback, which is great for the genre. He also doesn't cheat when he takes the story of the film to its logical and tragic conclusion, which is nihilistic and incredibly disturbing, but also not terribly shocking. One of the best compliments I can give is that it reminded me of some of my favorite episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE.
OCULUS is an intense piece of horror cinema and is probably my favorite of the genre since THE CONJURING.
4.5 out of 5 Stars.
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Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2014
Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2023
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Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2014
Top reviews from other countries
Doktor von Pain
Dieser Film bleibt hinter seinen Möglichkeiten zurück
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A Reflection on Outstanding Horror
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Dadem88Pi
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