Mirrors. Scary things really…and I don’t just mean that shock you get when you peer at yourself through bleary-eyes after a night on the sauce. Their sinister potential has been exploited in horror films for as long as they have been made – distorting the vision of the hapless hero, displaying hideous other worlds or as a visual representation of “He’s behind you!!” This last trope has become particularly ubiquitous and a little cliche – how many times do we need to see the shocking change in perspective caused by closing a bathroom cabinet? Oculus is a horror film revolving around a haunted glass that employs these well-worn tropes while also trying to do something more complex with its smoke and mirrors.
The story concerns siblings Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and Tim (Brenton Thwaites). Now in their twenties, they are reunited for the first time in years as Tim is released from a psychiatric facility where he has lived since a tragic and violent incident in their childhood. Through flashbacks we see how a mysterious mirror seemed to take control of their once loving father, turning him against his family. In the present day, Kaylie and Tim attempt to destroy the mirror and the vicious spirits who inhabit it.
Upon first viewing, Oculus appears to be an imaginative take on a well worn genre but this itself is a trick. Writer/director Mike Flanagan does a fantastic job of playing with space and time, shuffling between past and present, reality and hallucinations but when it comes to the scares, the film lets itself down by using the same sinister looking spirits and tired shouts of “Boo!” that we’re all far too accustomed to. The resulting film may be interesting to watch but all the effort has gone into the twists and turns of the story with little emphasis on any original scares.
This doesn’t mean that Oculus isn’t an entertaining watch. The cast all throw themselves into their roles with gusto (I especially enjoyed Katee Sackhoff’s descent into madness and Karen Gillan’s impressive American accent) and Flanagan shows himself to be a director to watch. If more thought had been given to the fear factor, Oculus could have been a modern horror classic, as it is it’s an enjoyably twisty thriller.