Walking out of the theater, you can’t help but be disappointed with
“Oculus.” That isn’t to say Mike Flanagan’s haunted mirror tale is bad,
because it isn’t, but there’s a world of unrealized potential left on
the screen. Between Flanagan’s last outing, the no-budget “Absentia,”
and a cast that includes geek favorites Karen Gillan (“Doctor Who”) and
Katee Sackhoff (“Battlestar Galactica”), you have higher hopes than what
you get.
The movie begins with Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites) getting out of a
mental institution where he’s been for eleven years, a good start for
any horror movie. His sister Kaylie (Gillan) picks him up and almost
immediately attempts to hold him to a promise made when he was ten years
old. A haunted mirror possessed their father (Rory Cochrane) and made
him kill their mother (Sackhoff), and Tim then shot dear old dad. Kaylie
has tracked it down, and plans to kill the hell out of it. That sounds
pretty easy, mirrors break all the time, but unfortunately this one is
damn near sentient, and can control your mind and defend itself.
“Oculus” presents two parallel timelines. As the present day drama
with Tim and Kaylie unfolds, we cut back and forth to their younger
days, watching things get more and more out of control with their
family. The problem is, the grown up version is way more compelling than
the kid version. Before you ever see them as kids, you know going it
how it ends, and miss out on any potential tension in that arena.
At first the action is framed in such a way that Tim seems like the
sane one, while Kaylie, with her intricate series of traps, alarms, and
fail safes, spouting her haunted mirror theory, sounds like a raving
lunatic. Tim has a rational explanation for everything they experienced,
and for a second you think that maybe she’s the one who is deluded. But
the movie makes it obvious what you’re supposed to believe, which one
is right, and this option loses any traction before ever getting
started. It’s like the movie can’t decide if it wants to be a ghost
story or a psychological thriller.
The film tries to create a conflict between the mental versus the
supernatural. As Tim and Kaylie do battle with the mirror—which can,
admittedly, be hard to take seriously—it takes over their minds, making
them see things that aren’t there, hear people who aren’t talking, and
wake up in strange places. While this device is used to great effect a
couple of times—most notably that scene in all of the trailers where she
thinks she’s biting an apple—it is overused and played out. You get the
point the film is going for—they can’t even trust their own minds—but
after the tenth time, it’s an empty gimmick, a copout that gets the film
out of actually telling a story. They get into all of these sticky
situations, you wonder how they’ll be resolved, but they aren’t. The
script plays this get-out-of-jail-free card and all of a sudden the
characters are somewhere else. It’s cheap and frustrating.
Overall, even the atmosphere let me down. Mirrors are creepy. To this
day, I can’t get up in the middle of the night to pee without thinking
of this one bit from a mystery anthology show I saw when I was kid.
There is nothing I remember except one scene, set in a bathroom, where a
guy sees a form in a mirror, whips around, and there’s no one there.
Then of course, there’s no one in the mirror, but when he turns, boom,
shadowy figure that kills him or something, I don’t recall the exact
outcome. But it was terrifying then, and it’s terrifying now. For a
movie about the ultimate scary mirror, “Oculus” makes shockingly little
use of their inherent eeriness. Early on, the film plays a trick similar
to the one I just described, and the mirror is filmed from odd angles
that enhance the sinister nature, but these strategies fall by the
wayside in short order or are overused to the point where they’re no
longer effective.
You want to shake Kaylie. For all of her overly elaborate plans and
traps for the mirror, she is way more concerned with documenting her
actions than actually destroying the damn thing. As the siblings lose
more and more control, they miss one opportunity after another to do
what they came to do. Whatever power or force or hold the mirror has
gets stronger over time, so instead of bashing the thing to hell right
away, when it is weak, they wait until they get to a point where they
have absolutely no possibility of success.
By the time you get to the end, you know exactly how “Oculus” is
going to resolve the situation. You’re left unsatisfied, like a meal
that smells delicious when cooking, but winds up tasteless and bland on
the table. The finished product isn’t terrible, and while there are some
jump scares and creepy scenes, considering the pieces, they never
amount to much.
Mike Flanagan (writer/director)/Jeff Howard (writer)
CAST: Karen Gillan…Kaylie Russell
Brenton Thwaites…Tim Russell
Katee Sackhoff…Marie Russell
Rory Cochrane…Alan Russell
Annalise Basso…Young Kaylie
Garrett Ryan…Young Tim
