Review of Oculus (2014) by Meydianarizki21 — 16 Nov 2021

Very Disappointed.

I love the horror genre, and I will tolerate a bad horror film to see new concepts, new monsters, new paranormal threats, or new horrific themes in the genre. To me, even bad horror movies have something to add to the genre and are worth watching. When I saw the previews for this movie, I was immediately interested. It looked original. It wasn't a monster movie, it wasn't a psycho murdered movie, and it wasn't your average ghost story. After watching, I must say I was pretty disappointed with the lack of innovation.

The first half of the movie is more or less an introduction, laying the groundwork to the story, the background, the characters, etc. and I must say this part was done quite well, and it was very intriguing. As the explanation unraveled I was eager for the adventure to begin because the story setup was excellent and leaves the audience primed for a good story. The last half of the film is the bulk of the "horror" part, however there is a strange element of time in this film which made it kind of hard to follow, and the film doesn't display a consistent timeline. Often I was left confused as to exactly if the characters were in the present, reliving old memories as their old selves, or if what we were seeing was just a flashback. Usually if a story has a lot of time changing (going back and forth through time in flashbacks), what happens in the present is mostly, somehow, explained in the story when it switches back to the present, but what happens in this film is that once the flashbacks begin to take over the story, there is almost no explanation of what is happening in the present. The story will flash back to the present and leave the audience wondering what's going on, or what happened in the interim, or why this character is doing this, or why that character is doing that.

The film could have also been so much better if there was perhaps a "tell" of some sort when what the characters were experiencing was a paranormal event or not. The film makes many references to illusions or hypnotic states as a plot driver, but at some points it is so diluted even you as the audience member are wondering, wait is what's happening here, really happening, or are the characters just imagining it happening? There is no way to tell, and the film does nothing to explain it. You are just left wondering, and that to me is a weak storyline, leaving it up to the audience to decide.

In all, it started off promising and ended quite ridiculously, with none of the phenomena really explained at all, and the characters more or less completely failed at every objective. Not to say that a story MUST have a happy ending in order to be a good film, but it must have some sort of resolution, even if the ending is not always a good one for the characters themselves. This story failed to grasp the really interesting parts- the paranormal phenomena surrounding the circumstances, the two lead characters having opposing ideas about what had happened, and how what happened in the past is explained (or in this film, not explained.) Basically it's a bad horror movie, not a 100% waste of time, but certainly not a memorable film, and not one that leaves you thinking about it afterward, except to wonder about how very little of it seemed to make any sort of sense.