Directed by
Mike Flanagan
Demonic possessions take many forms
in the movies. From Chucky dolls (Child’s Play) to videotapes (The Ring) to cars (Christine), cinematic demons show little discrimination for what
material form they choose to manifest themselves through.
In Mike Flanagan’s Oculus, the object providing a medium
for demons to haunt innocent victims is an antique mirror, and this leads to
the first major problem with the movie: The fact that a mirror serves as the
object of possession proves ultimately rather incidental. It may as well have been a chandelier or
window or toenail clippers or a toilet seat cover. Demons possessed Chucky in order to
communicate with the other characters in the movie, while in The Ring, characters who watched the video
died shortly afterwards. In other
words, those demons were purposeful in selecting their channels for interacting
with the real world. In Oculus, it is not as though the characters
enter the mirror and are transformed into an altered and distorted state. That would demand a higher degree of
originality and creativity that this movie simply doesn’t have. No, sorry to say, the mirror is just your
typical run-of-the-mill possessed object – you know, the ones that kill people and turn off the
lights and cause everyone else around the main characters to call them crazy.
As
for the mirror itself, it looks innocent enough – not unlike one found in a
backroom of a secondhand pawn shop. But
somehow unbeknownst to nearly every character in Oculus, it actually carries a long and ominous history of owners
who have gone crazy and killed themselves and others (it’s pretty remarkable
how comprehensive and detailed this history is, but I’ll try to suspend my disbelief). As the film opens, we are
introduced to a pair of grown siblings who have been separated for a
considerable amount of time as a result of being traumatized by the mirror as
kids: Kaylie (Karen Gillan), who has devoted much of her young adult life to
tracking down the mirror through auction houses, and Tim (Brenton Thwaites),
who is just being released from a prolonged stay at a mental institution. Their deceased parents fell victim to the
mirror when Kaylie and Tim were pre-adolescents, and now that they have found
the mirror once again, they have vowed to show the world its supernatural
sinister power.
At least that’s what Kaylie wants to do. Tim’s many years of psychotherapy have
convinced him that the tragic events of the past were simply the result of
all-too-human malice, and as a result, he spends much of the first half of Oculus functioning as the conscientious
skeptic pitted against Kaylie’s firmly committed truth-seeker. In a strange way, the movie bears resemblance
to The Butterfly Effect (which also featured
a lead character named Kaylie): The horrible things which transpired in the past are framed
through the present-day perspectives of the grown characters. This leads to an interesting but ultimately pointless
strategy by writer-director Flanagan: Instead of structuring the narrative in
discrete flashback and present-day units, events of the past and present are
shown as fluid, meaning that on occasion pre-teen Tim and grownup Tim share the
same space within the frame (it would have been nice to see the two versions of
Tim have a conversation with one another like the witty diner scene in Looper, but the movie is too concerned
with boo! moments than Kafkaesque self-inquiry).
I
call this strategy pointless because it doesn’t really reveal anything
important or identifiable in the ways in which the mirror haunts Kaylie and
Tim. After seeing Oculus, I can definitively state that the most effed-up thing the
mirror does to its victims is make them think they are using a particular
object for a specific purpose, but in fact it turns out to be a completely
different object. For example, a
character thinks that he or she is biting into an apple when – Whoops! – it turns
out to be a lightbulb. But this only
happens two or three times. Nearby
plants die, the power goes out and the phone lines go down. Yada yada yada. And yes, demons are unleashed through the mirror,
but they do little except for scream and run around clumsily. They’re not too unlike the zombies in Zombieland.
Anyway,
the real thrust of Kaylie’s experiment is to prove definitively to Tim and the
rest of the world that her father (Rory Cochrane) wasn’t a sadistic psycho who
randomly killed his wife (Katee Sackhoff) shortly after moving her and young Kaylie
and Tim into a new house. She wants to
show that the mirror was the thing that convinced him to do it. That’s fine and dandy, except (A) How Kaylie
is able to get ahold of the mirror without anyone else knowing the backstory of
her relationship to it is completely implausible, (B) She doesn’t seem to
realize that messing around with the mirror won’t bring her parents back to
life or meaningfully exonerate her father, and (C) The damage has already been
done – her parents are dead and her brother’s spent his teenage years institutionalized. And then there’s the fundamental (and unanswered)
question of why as kids Kaylie and Tim were impervious to the powers of the mirror
in the first place. Of course, you’re
not supposed to ask these questions of logic during a horror movie like Oculus.
But that doesn’t absolve the movie of a responsibility to uphold the
intelligence of its audience, which it fails to do particularly during its
final half. Malevolent things happen for
no reason which is of course bad for the characters, but it’s bad for the movie
when the audience stops seeking to locate a reasonable explanation and simply
chalks it up to “demons are really bad and all-powerful.”
Oculus has
two initial strengths working for it. One
is the mirror itself – a fertile and creatively rich object which could be used
in a variety of primordial ways to freak the characters (and audiences)
out. The other is the Moulder-and-Skully-like
dynamic between Kaylie and Tim. But
somehow, neither of these strengths ever really materialize. Worse yet, the movie isn’t even all that
scary. Because we know the supernatural
power of the mirror from the onset, witnessing its sensational effects is never
really that shocking. And because the
movie emphasizes that the mirror distorts reality, we soon sense the manipulative
ways in which the screenplay selectively chooses to merge and divide the real-world
from illusion when most convenient.
Once
upon a time, there was a movie called Candyman
which also featured a demon using a mirror to channel its evil
prowess. In that movie, Virginia Madsen
played a graduate student (getting her degree in folk studies, not
horticulture) who is told to look into the mirror and say Candyman’s name five
times. Then, a Lionel Richie-looking demon
would become unleashed and put the poor souls at Cabrini-Green out of their
misery. That was a movie which worked
not only because it used mirrors better but because it more closely adhered to
a proscribed set of rules. Oculus doesn’t use rules, which makes
for bloody chaos. Instead, a movie
should have been made about someone giving the antique mirror as a gag gift to Billy Bob Thornton. At least then there
would have been some legitimate terror.
Rating: 2 stars
