Oculus

I have to admit that I hadn’t held the highest expectations for the movie Oculus. I mean, a killer mirror? Seriously?

However, I stand pleased to report that the movie surprised me. It’s rare to find good horror, when filmmakers rely so often upon special effects and shadows that jump up and scream “Boo” rather than decent storytelling.

Oculus tells the story of a brother and sister who, as children, watched their father shoot their mother to death—before the brother (supposedly) killed the father in self-defense.

Fast-forward to eleven years later, while the state releases the brother (now 21 years old) from the mental hospital in which he has remained a prisoner ever since the double homicide.

Prior to the brother’s arrest, both he and his sister insisted that a haunted mirror murdered their parents. No one believes them, naturally.

While the brother grows up in a mental ward, his doctors convince him that he imagined everything he remembers about the supposedly haunted mirror.

The sister (now 23 years old) hunts down the mirror, more-or-less steals it from the auction house at which she and her fiancé work, moves the mirror to her childhood home (still in her ownership), and awaits her brother’s release.

The sister surrounds the mirror with cameras and computers that try a little too hard to advertise Apple. She intends, with her brother’s help, to prove once and for all that the evil entity inside the mirror killed her parents.

Her brother argues that both of them invented the mirror’s paranormal resident. He argues from the side of logic. She argues from the side of intuition (gender roles, anyone?).

The movie’s writers make it clear from the get-go that the mirror is, indeed, haunted. However, it might’ve proven more interesting to actually call into question which of the siblings properly recalled the events that led to their parents’ demises.

Did the brother convince himself that nothing supernatural happened as a defense mechanism, or did the sister convince herself of the supernatural entity for the same reason? Even when the creepy, paranormal stuff started, the writers could’ve elected to play it as, “Hey, did that really happen, or did the sister only think it did because she’s losing her mind?”

But, as I said, the movie made it clear fewer than five minutes into the movie which of the two siblings remembered events correctly.

Director Mike Flanagan tells the story’s past and present almost simultaneously. He switches back and forth, sometimes so rapidly that one scene (taking place in the present) bleeds right into a similar scene (from the past) only to flash cut back into the present.

The cinematography looks great. The camera sweeps through entire series of micro events while it weaves through the house that serves as the movie’s center stage. Said cinematography manages to look beautiful and skilled without calling attention to itself.

Heck, even most of the acting proves pretty impressive. How rare is that for horror?

The setting makes the fantasy movie, and the villain makes the horror. Oculus proves no different. Its audience will feel its villain right in its guts. Oculus’s villain is misunderstanding, confusion, delusion, the unknown, the second-guessing at the crucial moments, and that nagging feeling that we don’t truly understand the crisis that faces us.

These all serve as instinctual fears. When we can’t trust our senses, we experience a stomach-borne terror. We understand on some level that everything we perceive remains vulnerable to our biases (and the mental manipulations of those who whisper in our ears, who cannot help but repackage information so as to accomplish their own ends).

Oculus takes our build-in fears of manipulation, misleading information, and biases and (like Planeteers pointing together their rings) combines them to create an ultimate, terrifying demon.

This movie works very well. Again, I wish the writers had held their cards a little closer to their chests and left the audience wondering which of the two siblings maintained the correct memory of the events that led to their parents’ deaths, but I’m far removed from complaining with the results.

This movie is worth your time. Check it out.

(You can find Martin Wolt, Jr.'s novels on Kindle and his short fiction at martinwolt.blogspot.com)