Admittedly, I was a bit skeptical when Oculus came out. While the trailers looked good, I noticed that one of the production companies behind it was WWE Studios, and they’re not exactly known for making great movies. But when I finally got a chance to see it, I was very pleasantly surprised. It ended up being my favorite horror movie of the year, and to this day I love popping it into my blu ray player and returning to the crazy, mind-bending story that Mike Flanagan created.
So what’s this movie about? Basically, it’s about a haunted mirror. I know, that’s a tired concept that we’ve seen a million times before, but this time it’s different. Nothing jumps out from the mirror, and it does way more than just make people see things in it that aren’t really there. Instead, the mirror warps people’s perception of the entire world around them. It hijacks all their senses and makes them see, hear, and feel whatever it wants them to.
More specifically, the movie focuses on Tim and Kaylie, two siblings who get their hands on the mirror years after it tore their family apart when they were kids. Tim was sent to a mental institution after their parents were both killed, and the movie picks up the story right when he gets out and sees his sister for the first time in years. Coincidentally, he’s released just after Kaylie finally tracks down the mirror again, so she plans to destroy it with him.
Shortly after their reunion, they bring the mirror to their childhood home, and once there, they begin to argue about whether or not it’s really haunted. Initially, Tim is skeptical because his years of therapy have convinced him that he and his sister simply made up the supernatural stuff, but Kaylie still believes it. In fact, she has done a lot of research about it, and she knows all about the people who had the mirror before her family and how it affected them and ended up killing them. She explains this all to Tim and relates it to their experiences as children, and he provides alternative explanations that his therapists have suggested to him throughout the years.
All this setup takes some time, but it’s worth it because it whets your appetite and makes you really want to see the mirror in action. After hearing so much about it and what it can do, you want to see it for yourself, and once the horror kicks in, the payoff does not disappoint.
The mirror’s strategy against its old rivals is to disorient them so much that they can no longer tell the difference between reality and fantasy, and it does a great job of that. As you’re watching it, there are things you think are real that turn out to be illusory, and there are things you think are fake that turn out to be real.
The movie also moves seamlessly between the present day and the siblings’ experiences with the mirror as kids, telling both stories simultaneously, and that just adds to the effect. Not only do you never know what is and isn’t real, but you can never settle in and know exactly where you’ll be from minute to minute either. Right when you think you know for sure that the movie will continue in the present day for a little while, it switches back to the past, and vice versa.
All of this back and forth between real, fake, present, and past really messes with your head. The mirror disorients you just as much as it does Tim and Kaylie, drawing you into the story and making you feel their fear, and the effect lingers on even after the movie is over. When I walked out of the theater after seeing it for the first time, I reached into my pocket and just about freaked out when I felt my ticket stub in there. I forgot that I had put it in that pocket, so for a second I thought it was the mirror messing with my perception of reality. Obviously it wasn’t, but that’s how effective this movie is.
Now, as with any great horror movie, Oculus is more than just scares and disorientation. It’s also a really well-told story. The movie is edited in such a way that even though the back and forth between past and present is disorienting, the two timelines still come across quite clearly. By the time the movie is over, you know exactly what happened to Tim and Kaylie when they were kids, and while you don’t always know if the switches from the present to the past are simply flashbacks or if the mirror is making them relive their childhood experiences, the general flow of what’s happening is clear enough.
Plus, the characters of Tim and Kaylie are very likeable too. They’re well-written and well-acted, and you really come to root for them as the movie goes on. You want them to succeed in their attempt to destroy the mirror in the present, and although you already know how their childhood story ends, the movie still manages to make you worry about their younger selves and wonder just how that part of the story will get to its inevitable conclusion.
In particular, the actress who plays young Kaylie, Annalise Basso, deserves special mention. She manages to convey a feeling of absolute terror while also having to be brave for her brother, and I think this performance would have made her a star if more people had seen the movie.
All in all, if you’ve never seen Oculus, I highly recommend that you check it out. In my opinion, it’s one of the best horror movies of the 2010’s, and it introduced me to a filmmaker that I still follow today. Any time I hear about a new project that Mike Flanagan is working on, I always get really excited because I know he’s going to turn out quality work, and it’s all thanks to a great first impression he made back in 2014.
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