Review of Oculus (2014) by Jonathan D — 27 Sep 2014

Oculus is a horror film that's determined to work as "psychological horror", and it achieves a lot with a little. There's some blood and no gore. The "monster" is an inanimate object: a mirror. Yuppie Kaylie believes that ten years ago, this mirror drove her father to murder her mother, drove her brother to murder their father, and that it is able to literally suck the life out of a room, and now she's determined to prove its powers. She has reacquired the mirror and locked it in the house where terrible things happened to her family. She plans to document what it's capable of.

There's a lot of clever and ambitious stuff here. The movie shifts freely between present day and the time when she and her brother were teens. It's all part of the controlled confusion. What is really happening, what is occurring in Kaylie and her brother Tim's memory, and what are they hallucinating? Often the editing and ambiguous camera angles are very carefully crafted. The expense is that sometimes the movie becomes overly convoluted. I sometimes wondered whether all these connections were just for effect, or whether writer/director/editor Mike Flanagan knew exactly what was real and when, and that a dozen viewings would reveal the perfect construction.

It takes a while before the gas really gets turned on, but the story did always tease and compel. Karen Gillan ("Galaxy of the Guardian's" Nebula) as adult Kaylie is unfortunately the weak link in the cast, and a more compelling actress would have pulled me into her compulsion more effectively.

Flanagan isn't Kubrick, but he works hard to make something with the creepiness of "The Shining" and Oculus has its moments. It hangs together and pays off in a satisfying manner.