“Oculus” — 2.5/5 stars
Unoriginal haunted mirror flick looks good but lacks scares, originality
Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Has horror lost all its gall?
A young man, Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites of “Home and Away”), is released from a mental institution for the first time since he shot his father Alan (Rory Cochrane of “Argo”) as a young boy. His doctor has deemed him sane and nonviolent enough to function in society again.
Tim still knows that he was defending his sister, Kaylie (Karen Gillan of “Doctor Who”), and himself from unusual evil forces that took hold of their parents, but he has managed to put on an act convincing enough to be released. He hopes to forget the past and try and move forward, but his sister is determined to prove his innocence.
She believes that all the horror their family witnessed and suffered was caused by a cursed mirror in their father’s study. When the children were young, their father started becoming remote, as if put in a trance by the mirror. The mother, Marie (Katee Sackhoff of “Battlestar Galactica”), believed her husband was having an affair, and their marriage started to crumble.
Did child neglect and spousal abuse arise because of the mirror’s malevolent power, or did the children transfer their childhood trauma into an inanimate object?
Because she works at an auction house, Kaylie is able to obtain the mirror in transit before it ships to the person who purchased the expensive antique. She brings Tim to their childhood house and sets up an elaborate system to prove that the mirror is haunted. Alarms, pulleys, house plants, dogs, cameras, food and crates of water surround the mirror. It would take too much time to explain the purpose of all those objects, but Kaylie wants to scientifically prove that the mirror caused not only the violence in her own family but a history of murder and suffering in the last hundred years.
The mirror possesses alluring powers that hypnotize people into seeing and experiencing things that are not actually happening. Or are they?
Compared to a majority of modern horror films, “Oculus” is slightly above average. It is an efficient, handsomely crafted spookfest that slowly increases the tension and doles out its scares without relying on buckets of gore (not that there is anything wrong with high volumes of viscera, if it is splattered with skill).
The plot, or Basil Exposition as British film critic Mark Kermode likes to call it, is overly convoluted and too regimented. The mirror comes with a long list of guidelines about how it functions. So much time is spent trying to logically explain this ultimately insignificant gobbledygook that the horror that transpires seems ludicrous.
Perhaps I have become numb to being frightened in nearly all films after having seen too many hardcore horror films, but I struggle to understand how anyone over the age of 13 could possibly find this remotely scary. One might momentarily be startled, but everything on screen is standard material.
That is another reason the film is mediocre: It feels like a dozen other films. It is as if the filmmakers looked at the box office returns for recent horror films and took from a handful of them. The film is from the producer of “Paranormal Activity” and “Insidious,” and it feels cobbled together from pieces of those films as well as last summer’s hit, “The Conjuring.”
The film steals from recent horror films that stole themselves from earlier films. To see this type of film done exceedingly well, watch the 1963 film version of “The Haunting,” based on Shirley Jackson’s novel “The Haunting of Hill House.”
“Oculus” is slick but piecemeal, and, like the mirror, only reflects what comes before it.