Oculus (2013)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

Oculus (2013) – M. Flanagan

I feel like I’m slumming it when I dip my toes into the horror genre these days – too few pearls in these oysters. Yet, Oculus had some fairly positive reviews and I enjoyed director Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (2018) mini-series (but not his update of The Shining called Doctor Sleep, 2019). I guess I was willing to take a risk on a film about a haunted mirror due to my undying love of Ealing Studios’ horror anthology Dead of Night (1945) which included such a story directed by Robert Hamer; there is also a haunted mirror episode in Amicus’ From Beyond the Grave (1974) starring David Warner.  Oculus doesn’t quite follow from these (or other genre clichés) but instead seems to take place after one of these episodes with a haunted mirror has already taken place. Indeed, the movie shows us current events – when a sister (Karen Gillan) and brother (Brenton Thwaites) manage to find a suspected haunted mirror from their youth (that led to some horrible outcome for their parents) and attempt to document its supernatural properties and/or destroy it. Half the movie is flashbacks to the original events and these are far scarier than the “framing” story involving the adult kids (which is a little confusing because the mirror is able to alter what they perceive). Yet somehow the theme that the director seems to want to discuss (childhood trauma and its effects on adults) isn’t really explored and the film opts to tie up its conclusion in a neat (and foreshadowed) bow.  I guess this makes it better than the many horror outings with incomprehensible plots.  However, Flanagan seems to need more time to fully develop his themes (as in Hill House).