Oculus | Mike Flanagan | April 11, 2014
In recent years, supernatural horror films have oscillated between found footage and period pieces for the most part, but Mike Flanagan’s Oculus attempts to break new ground, or at least bring horror back to its roots. Based on his short film from 2006, Oculus follows Kaylie Russell (Karen Gillan, Guardians of the Galaxy) and Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites, The Signal, The Giver, and Maleficent) in their one-night-only attempt to prove that a mirror Kaylie believes responsible for the homicides of her parents is haunted.
Oculus starts off firmly established in reality (apart from a supposedly haunted mirror) in act 1 with the treated Tim being discharged from a mental hospital after a little over a decade. After the deaths of Allan (Rory Cochrane, Argo) and Marie (Katee Sackhoff, Riddick), his parents, Tim was locked up and treated for shooting his dad. Kaylie, meanwhile, was shuffled through the foster system, attended college, and inherited their old house, all the while investigating the gruesome history of the Lasser Glass, the ornate antique mirror that hung in Allan’s home office, and suffering from night terrors. Once Tim is out, Kaylie recruits the reluctant Tim to help her prove that the Glass is really haunted – both to show that Tim isn’t crazy and to show up everyone who made fun of her in school. She secures the Glass for a night before it gets shipped off to whoever bought it at an auction and has an elaborate setup in the office of their old house (multiple cameras, two desktop Macs, several timers, a dog, an anchor mounted to the ceiling on a 30-minute timer, potted plants, and halogen pop-up lanterns) to verify her hypothesis. And from there on out, the audience can’t help but watch as her best-laid plans slowly go to pot as the Glass starts to exert its warped influence.
What follows in the other two acts is a well-paced and creative take on supernatural horror. The events of the past unfold in detail (even though the audience already received hints of what happened and a quick case file report), interweaving with the events of the present, which is a slight bit confusing if you try to figure out whose point of view the flashbacks are from. Speaking of which, Oculus continues to play with viewers, making them question the reliability of Kaylie and Tim, what they’re seeing in the present, their memories of the two weeks they spent in the house when they moved in with their parents, and what is being recorded by the cameras.
By the end of Oculus, though, the jump scares have become few and far between, the moments of gross-out horror have given way to dread, and all agency has been stripped from Kaylie and Tim by the manipulative Lasser Glass. That being said, Gillan and Thwaites’s American accents (most likely East Coast) are solid for the most part, as is the cinematography, which is particularly good for a horror film.
Join the conversation