Reviewed by Kevin Scott, MoreHorror.com
Oculus (2013)
Written by: Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard, Jeff Seidman
Directed by: Mike Flanagan
Cast: Karen Gillan (Kaylie Russell), Brenton Thwaites (Tim Russell), Katee Sackhoff (Marie Russell), Rory Cochrane (Alan Russell), Annalise Basso (Young Kaylie), Garrett Ryan (Young Tim), James Lafferty (Michael Dumont)
Mirrors have always given me the creeps. Your refection showing the toll of time and aging, those tried and true horror tropes of your reflection not being tethered to what you do on the other side of the glass, or the mirror itself being a gateway to another world. So it would be a pretty easy sell to make a movie about an evil mirror. It’s even been done a few times before. I just watched another pretty clever mirror entry with David Warner. It was part of the classic Amicus Anthology “From Beyond the Grave”. He comes under the control of an evil spirit living in an old mirror that he purchases from Peter Cushing at an antique store. The spirit requires a pound of flesh from time to time, so to speak.
There’s a lot of similarities to that in “Oculus”, but with some unique twist also taken from some pretty classic horror films. The plot centers mostly around a strong female lead. If you read the credits before this review, Katee Sachhoff may come to mind immediately. She recently found her defining role in the new “Battlestar Galactica” as a much more attractive incarnation of Starbuck. Yes even more attractive than Face from “The A Team”, Mr. Dirk Benedict. She’s a supporting character in this one. The framework of the story centers around a mysterious family homicide that involved a father killing the mother, and the son killing the father in self-defense. A decade later the surviving daughter of the family, Kaylie is working at a high end auction house, and finds the old mirror that used to hang in her father’s study. This wasn’t serendipity, she was looking for it in a very deliberate fashion. She believes the mirror is evil, it is responsible for the tragedy that befell her family, and her brother’s time in a mental institution after killing his father. Her locating the mirror coincides with her brother’s release back into society.
During a first lunch with her brother after his release, she delicately lays out a plan to prove it was the mirror. She is going to steal it from the auction house, bring it back to their old family house, and destroy it for good. She asks for his help, but after a decade of head shrinking he’s not sold on a supernatural explanation for all this. He does reluctantly agree, and the two begin a really long night. Remember that strong female lead? Kaylie rigs the house (in Nancy from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” fashion) with every kind of conceivable provision they may need to not become vulnerable to the mirrors power, and even fabricates a trap for the mirror itself to smash it, if things go really bad.
It appears that the mirror is more of a vampire of sorts that feeds on the energy of living, all the while killing them in the process, and ultimately imprisoning them on the other side. Kind of like the Overlook Hotel from “The Shining”, except this mirror makes you look like you have been doing a lot of meth before you ultimately leave the physical world. You have to pay attention. The story is told by toggling back and forth from the present and the past. Two separate stories in two separate times that are intertwined, but ultimately converge. To see the degeneration of the mother from upscale bohemian suburbanite to the deformed sister’s from “Pet Semetary” uglier sister is pretty jarring.
“Oculus” works more than most “ghost in the machine” type films because it uses the mirrors power to beguile its victims to keep the viewer wondering what’s real and what isn’t. The cast is solid and they sell the sorrow of evil seeping in and growing like a cancer until everyone is destroyed. I would like to see a really exquisite sequel to this one.
SOURCE: More Horror – Read entire story here.