Film Review - Oculus (2013)

Imagine, if you will, a cross between The Amityville Horror and that haunted mirror segment from Dead of Night. If you can conjure up that mish-mash in your brain then you’ve got the premise of Oculus in a nutshell. Unfortunately those comparisons aren’t totally complimentary; Oculus is a film which fails to generate anything like Dead of Night’s sustained sense of menace, but is as wildly inconsistent as Amityville.

Weaving two narrative strands, the film sees brother and sister combo Kaylie and Tim tussle with a mysterious mirror which exudes some awful, malevolent power, turning those who gaze upon it into psychotic killers and leaves a trail of corpses in its wake.

Present day and Kaylie (Karen Gillan) has acquired the beastly piece of furniture and along with Tim (Brenton Thwaites), newly released from a mental institution, seeks to do battle with it, in an attempt to dominate and defeat its evil, thereby lifting some personal weight which has been hanging over her. In an interesting development, we repeatedly shift backward eleven years prior, to see a younger version of the brother-sister duo’s lives ruined as their father slowly goes insane and wreaks havoc whilst under the mirror’s infernal influence.

There are some nice individual touches here which keep Oculus from being completely forgettable, but the narrative hops around in a fairly jarring way and there’s nowhere near enough unrelenting terror. It’s at its best when take steps to eschew the Amityville-style slasher chaos and sets its sights on a more ambiguous horror. The neatest trick is manifesting the mirror’s power as one which affects the minds of those who would seek to harm it. As Kaylie and Tim attempt to carry out their plan to destroy it, they’re bombarded with horrific visions of the past and spatial, temporal red herrings. The mirror’s first line of defence is to confuse and demoralise so we’re never quite sure what’s real and what is not. That confusion is a classic trope which puts me in mind of older, greater benchmarks such as Jack Clayton’s The Innocents or to a lesser extent Robert Wise’s The Haunting.

It’s more than a curiosity or a footnote in the encyclopaedia of psychological horror movies, but it lacks the finishing touch which would elevate it into anything greater than a solid example of the genre. Oculus is satisfying, it’s not breathtaking.

[rating=3]
Chris Banks

Genre:
Horror
Distrubutor:
Universal Pictures UK
Rating: 15
Release Date:
13th June 2014 (UK)
Director:
Mike Flanagan
Cast:
Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff, Rory Cochrane