Oculus

Much like The Conjuring from last summer, Oculus arrives with a wave of hype and strong word of mouth, turning it into somewhat of a horror movie event.  And while I think director and co-writer Mike Flanagan (who based his movie on a 2006 short film he did) definitely has a knack for the genre, pulls off some good shots and gets relatable performances out of his actors, the story he tries to tell is just a little too silly.  This is a mildly effective thriller that falls a little short due to one crucial reason - It's just not that scary.

The film's central gimmick is that we get two concurrent storylines following the same two people in different parts of their lives.  Because both plots (one set 11 years ago, the other in the present) take place in the same space, Flanagan can create parallels between the past and the present.  It's effective early on, but it gets a bit overdone as the movie goes on, as it starts to constantly switch back and forth at a moment's notice.  It can also be kind of confusing, though I think that is intentional.  The central villain in our story is actually an antique mirror that has been passed along to different owners, and has been causing a lot of trouble and mysterious deaths for anyone who has possessed it.  The thing looks like it'd be right at home in the Amityville Horror house, and rightly so.  There's an evil entity within the mirror that feeds off the life energy of things around it (such as house plants and dogs) to become strong enough to start attacking its human owners, by showing them horrifying visions within its glass, or playing deadly mind games with the people who surround it, making them think they're doing something, when they're really doing something much more dangerous that will lead to their deaths.

11 years ago, the evil mirror fell into hands of the Russell family.  As soon as the father, Alan (Rory Cochrane), set it up in his private study in their new home, strange things started to happen around the house, and Alan became increasingly violent to his wife (Katee Sackhoff) and two children, 12-year-old Kaylie (Annalise Basso) and 10-year-old Tim (Garrett Ryan).  In the end, both parents ended up dead, and poor Tim was sent off to a mental institution, due to his talk of a haunted mirror being the real cause of his parents' death.  In the present, the now 21-year-old Tim (Brenton Thwaites) has just been released, and has reached a certain peace with his nightmarish memories.  The doctors have convinced him that there was no evil mirror, and that his dad murdered his wife then killed himself due to a blow up over an affair the father was supposedly having.  He's ready to start a new life and put his past behind him, but his sister Kaylie (played by Karen Gillan as an adult) is not about to let him.

She's spent the past 11 years tracking the mirror down, as well as exploring its history, and the various victims it has claimed over the past 100 or so years it has existed.  She finally finds it at an auction house where she works at, and arranges to have it sent to her childhood home, so that she can document and record the paranormal events that happen around it, and prove that her brother and her were not crazy as children.  She brings her brother in on the project, who serves as the voice of reason during the early part of the film.  While she keeps on talking about a supernatural force within the glass that has killed dozens of people, he repeats the more rational and likely take on past events that the doctors at the institution pumped into his head.  But, as strange things and deadly illusions start popping up once again because of the presence of the mirror, Tim can ignore the truth no longer, and the two become determined to destroy the item that has tormented them for so long.

Despite the silly premise, Oculus does surprisingly play it smart for the most part.  The movie does a fairly good job of answering some of the more obvious questions the plot brings up.  Questions like, why can't Kaylie and Tim just smash the mirror?  Why do they stay in the house when the mirror starts messing with their minds, and showing them things and events that aren't really happening?  Or, why don't they call someone outside the house for help?  And sure, sometimes the answers to these questions are things you just kind of have to go with, but at least the movie is aware of them and covers them in a way that makes some sort of sense.  The screenplay by Flanagan and Jeff Howard also seems more interested in its characters than the usual low budget horror film.  It gives us time to get to know these people before the spooky stuff and the ghosts start popping up.  It's also clear that Flanagan is a gifted filmmaker, getting of some effective shots, and creating a sense of dread that builds slowly throughout the film.

So, why did I walk away somewhat disappointed with the film?  While the movie is good at building dread and suspense, the pay off is usually weak and disappointing.  The film does pull off a couple of effective moments, the strongest of which is a scene concerning a character mistaking a light bulb for an apple, and taking a bite out of it. (Trust me, it makes sense in context of the film itself.) These moments are way too far apart from each other, however.  In between these effective scenes, we get a whole lot of shots of people standing in front of the mirror, or ghostly images that kind of stand around, looking menacing, but don't really end up doing anything.  Oculus clearly wants to mess with our conception of what is real, making us question what's really happening, and what's illusion.  That's admirable in itself, but the movie cheats by constantly cutting back and forth between its two storylines.  Eventually the editing and the cross-cutting between events becomes so jumbled and rapid, it feels like the movie is trying way too hard to throw us off. 

It also must be said that the movie just isn't that scary in itself.  For all of its evil and ghostly illusions, the mirror itself just never becomes a menacing presence.  This could have been helped if some of the ghost-like visions it creates were more menacing, but like I said before, they usually just stand around, not really doing anything.  Sure, we jump the first time we see them lurking in the background, but when the movie relies on this trick over and over again, it starts to get monotonous, and we wait for the filmmakers to come up with some new tricks.  This never happens, which I think truly sinks the film, despite how well made it is.  I can see this approach working in the original format this story was told (a half hour short film), but at a full 100 minutes, there's just not enough here to keep the audience engaged after the initial excitement and promise is gone.

I would say that I am not sorry I saw Oculus, but I probably won't be going out of my way to see it again.  I do think that Mike Flanagan has a real future in the film industry, and I hope he goes on to much better things.  If this movie is any indication, he has a great knowledge of how to build characters and suspense.  He just needs to learn to carry it all the way through a picture to a satisfying end.

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