As far as sure thing money-makers in Hollywood go, you can’t really go wrong with high-concept low-budget horror. From Sam Raimi’s amateurish yet hugely successful 1981 film Evil Dead to 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, Hollywood has long turned to the niche genre over the years in the search of a safe and easy guaranteed profit. This trend has seen a resurgence in the last couple of years with the Paranormal Activity series, and in our era of 200 million dollar blockbuster 3D visual overloads, the stroke of genius of films such as Paranormal Activity is that they thrive on what they don’t show you. And Oculus is a perfect example of the Paranormal Activity formula slightly, ever so slightly, rejigged. Oculus features a next to nothing budget, a no name cast of primarily TV actors, minimal effects and simple stripped down sets. The difference is that this time, while the Paranormal Activity movies are more often than not exercises in tedium that barely reach the minimum requirements for tangible content in a feature length film, Oculus actually has some substance to back it up.
The premise and set-up is short and sweet: Oculus is a haunted mirror movie, pure and simple. And at the heart of the story, we find a family whose lives were irrevocably destroyed by that very haunted mirror and the brother and sister who happened to survive that ordeal. The film begins with us following the lives of those children, now all grown up eleven years later. Younger brother Tim (Thwaites) has just been discharged from a psychiatric hospital after being deemed fit for living in normal society, while his sister Kaylie (Gillan) has just arrived at the end of of a lifelong search for the antique mirror that she is certain is the cause behind the deaths and misfortunes of countless people over the centuries. When the siblings reunite after a long estrangement, Kaylie reveals to a reluctant and fragile Tim her plans to destroy the mirror and salvage their family’s tattered reputation. Kaylie then reveals an elaborate set up to do just that, one that involves multiple cameras, various sensors and detectors, a pet dog, and a ceiling-mounted anchor aimed right at the mirror, ready to destroy it if she should fail to reset its timer.
SPOILERS:
At this point, we don’t know what exactly happened all those years ago, why Tim was in a mental facility or the reasons behind that elaborate set up, but Oculus does a solid job of slowly and steadily revealing details and information. While some of the exposition is stilted and unnatural, the film’s strength is its reliance on the dialogue and interplay between the protagonists. The relationship between the two siblings is the core of the film and is fleshed out enough to elevate the film beyond other inferior horror products that shun any meaningful form of character development.
Once things get going, the film bounces around a lot between the present day and eleven years ago when Kaylie and Tim’s parents first acquired the mirror, and many of the scenes deftly and seamlessly weave back and forth between those two time periods. While this may seem like a risky and potentially unnecessarily confusing approach, the filmmakers use this technique very effectively to help elucidate events and create a general atmosphere of dread and foreboding terror. Not exactly a horror movie in the same way that recent high-concept films such as Sinister or Mama were, much of Oculus unfolds as an inner psychological battle as Kaylie and Tim struggle to maintain their hold on what’s real and what's just the mirror's trickery.
Speaking of Sinister, a low budget horror flick that involved an evil entity that can reside in film footage, Oculus shares the same major flaw as the Ethan Hawke-starring film. While it’s not necessarily a bad thing to not learn too much or figure out everything in a horror movie, Oculus and Sinister both fail for not clearly establishing the rules of the playing field or giving their characters much of a fighting chance. Besides it clearly having a strong survival instinct, the mirror in Oculus constantly pulls more and more out of its bottomless bag of tricks and uses them all in its battle of wits with Kaylie and Tim. From the mirror having an ability to possess people or to just manipulate what they see or hear, the filmmakers have lots of fun with this in a number of scenes that take full advantage of the fact that very little of what happens throughout can be trusted by the characters or the audience.
The problem is when this gets to the point where the audience realizes that all the rules are out of the window and pretty much anything could or could not happen, logic be damned. Paralleling the demise of Sinister’s protagonist, the protagonists in Oculus are completely helpless in the end and pretty much do everything that the mirror wants them to do. Although the main focus of Oculus is on setting up the struggle of the characters to cling to their bonds of family to resist the mirror’s power, much of the tension and suspense vanishes when you realize midway through proceedings that the mirror has such a substantial upper hand. And while the finale of Oculus does set things up for a potential sequel, those expecting any kind of resolution should look elsewhere: the horror genre thrives on dragging out franchises beyond the point of no return and milking them for all they’re worth. Oculus will doubtlessly prove to be no exception.
Verdict: Not as barebones content-wise as the Paranormal Activity films, Oculus does everything you want a horror movie to do: a bit of gore, a couple of scares, a twist here and there, and lots of well done good old-fashioned ominous atmosphere. More psychological thriller than pure horror, Oculus is an effective little film that will entertain those that take it at face value for what it is: a movie about a haunted mirror.
B-
Trailer:
Movie info:
Runtime:104 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Cast: Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff, Rory Cochrane
Director: Mike Flanagan
Screenplay: Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard
Cinematography: Michael Fimognari
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