It’s easy to note that director Mike Flanagan’s frightening Oculus mashes two masterpieces: The Shining and “The Haunted Mirror” from the multi-part, 77-minute long horror classic Dead of Night (1945). But Oculus was already deep into the territory of The Turn of the Screw before I registered that change of direction. Oculus‘ essence is the problem of whether a brother and a sister can agree on what they’re seeing, right when it is key for their sanity and survival.
Kaylie (Karen Gillan) blames an antique mirror for the catastrophe that befell her family, who once lived in a suburban mini-mansion in the golf-coursey part of the South. She’s charted the provenance of the mirror—like the misbehaving mirror in Dead of Night, “the Lasser Glass” was the property of an 18th-century British nobleman. The looking-glass drove a half-hundred victims to madness, self-mutilation and murder. Kaylie has turned her family’s vacant house into a makeshift parapsychological lab, with closed circuit cameras, laptops and a deadfall trap that can break the glass with one flick of a button—”We’re holding a gun to its head.”
Her witness: her estranged little brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites), who does the there-must-be-some-rational-explanation lines. We know better. The mirror has mirror-eyed wraiths lurking inside it. It beguiles, and warps time, reverting the brother and sister to childhood, making them rewatch the mental collapse of their father (Senator Joe McCarthy lookalike Rory Cochrane) and the demise of their mother (Katee Sackhoff of Battlestar Galactica).
Oculus is well-made and edited enough that it can tell you the horrifying things it’s going to do, and then still make you jump when it does them. Perhaps it’s more interesting to women than the average horror film—there’s heft to the theme of a daughter trying to avoid the fate that befell her mother. Sackhoff carries the weight of the film’s pity and perverse sensuality; she’s a housewife/captive, in nightgowns and loose housedresses, but she’s also a strapping, red-haired woman with a Gothic tattoo on one arm. Gillan’s rapid-fire dialogue and intensity makes the daughter a heroine to root for, even if you’re not sure she’s sane.
Oculous
R; 105 min.
