Oculus
Director: Mike Flanagan
Starring: Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff
104 mins; Class 15; KRS Releasing Ltd

My aversion to horror as a genre has been well documented. While, over the past few years, I have been subjected to quite a few eye-roll-inducing slasher movies that seem indistinguishable from one another, I have seen a few prime ex-amples of the genre that have proven that my bias is not completely well-founded.

Titles like Insidious (2011), Mama and Conjuring (both 2013), earned positive reviews from me thanks to their focus on the characters and the story rather than on providing cheap scares at the expense of the former.

Oculus falls in the latter camp, and while the narrative wavers at points and falls back onto some obvious tricks in others, it earns kudos from me thanks for the most part to the sextet that forms the main cast, each of whom contributes much to the emotional core of the movie.

The Lasser mirror is an antique piece whose true origins are unknown, yet it has brought tragedy and death to its numerous owners over the years. Its latest owners were the Russell spouses (Katie Sackhoff and Rory Cochrane), whose violent demise left their daughter Kaylie in foster care and their son Tim in a mental institution.

Fast-forward eleven years and the adult Tim (Brenton Thwaites) is being released. Yet, he is not given the chance to carry on with his life due to Kaylie’s (Karen Gillen) obsession with destroy-ing the mirror, whose reflections she is convinced harbour a supernatural force that causes paranoia and delusions in those who look into it.

Using all her resources, she re-acquires the mirror and places it in the exact same spot it hung in the old family home, preparing an elaborate technological setup which serves the purpose of aiding in the obliteration of the mirror’s malevolent force once and for all, while documenting it at the same time.

Writer / director Mike Flanagan shrewdly sacrifices gore for tension. The blood-spattered scenes are few but effective in enhancing the sense of foreboding that lingers throughout.

A scene involving an apple and a light bulb is particularly disturbing, as are many moments depicting the final days before the elder Russells’ killings.

While the levels of tension are constant for the most part, there are some lapses in the narrative – random apparitions of possessed people past and present confuse the issue rather than enhance the chills; and while the frequent cutting from past to the present is done with precision and serves to retain the attention, some shifts between eras are so fast it takes you moments to catch up.

Shrewdly sacrifices gore for tension

Ultimately, though, it is the characters that count, and Flanagan gives emotional resonance to the story of charming family undone by unexplained forces; and his actors go a long way in portraying this with honesty.

Gillan runs the gamut from strong and dependable to erratic and neurotic as the initially stable Kayleigh grows ever more unhinged as her obsession mingles with the mirror’s possession of her, even as she attempts to demolish it. The vulnerable-looking Thwaites earns oodles of sympathy as the older Tim hanging on with all his strength on his sanity which, after 10 years of careful treatment, threatens to abandon him once and for all.

Kudos also to the child actors Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan portraying the younger versions of Kayleigh and Tim. Not only are they well-cast physically to resemble their older counterparts, they both perfectly capture the emotions of two young, carefree and innocent children whose lives are torn apart by the deteriorating of their loving and adored parents Marie and Alan.

Similarly, Sackhoff and Cochrane’s portrayals of the doomed parents draw you in so closely into this tightly-knit family that it is difficult to not care for their plight.

As the story comes to its inevitable bloody conclusion, the lack of answers to the cause of the mirror’s powers and its origins exasperated me… although these leave the door wide open for the inevitable sequel.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.