Oculus has a promising premise, but it isn’t long before that promise gets broken. It begins with a guy called Tim, who gets released from a mental institute. It turns out that something bad happened when he was a kid in relation to an antique mirror. Now his sister has gotten in contact, saying she has managed to get a hold of that mirror, and she wants the two of them to prove the thing is haunted and thus responsible for ruining their childhood.
What is established early on is that the mirror (allegedly) has a means of messing with people's perception of the real world. That means that although the two siblings have gone to great lengths to provide a bunch of fail safes, including a deadman switch that will smash the mirror, none of these will work if the mirror simply tricks them into thinking they've worked. This apparently never occurred to them before setting up the elaborate experiment. Guess what happens.
This is a ghost story, and I'm a sucker for cool ghosts, especially if the movie doesn't do the boring thing of making the ghosts screw around for two hours, possess someone, and then get exorcised. This movie does have cool looking ghosts, but they don't fit very well into the story. They just sort of hang around, grinning malevolently whilst the mirror itself seems to do all the actual work. We're never given a reason for why the mirror is being evil, and this isn’t a problem; many a great horror movies has been made involving an intangible, unexplained evil. But it does need explaining why the hell there are all these other ghost assholes keep showing up, stealing the mirror's thunder.
The bigger problem though is that for all its atmosphere and style, the movie very quickly boils down to a routine of one character trying to do something, only to realise (to their continuing horror) that they didn’t do that thing but some other thing whilst under influence. A movie can only play the surprise dream sequence card once before it starts to piss off the audience, and this movie essentially does it non-stop.
When any given moment of the movie can be imaginary you stop being invested, because you know you're just being jerked around. Oculus has plenty of scares, but the movie does not leave you in any way satisfied afterwards because it never gets tired of cheating the viewer to tell its story.
The Movie that Won't Stop Cheating
Oculus has a promising premise, but it isn’t long before that promise gets broken. It begins with a guy called Tim, who gets released from a mental institute. It turns out that something bad happened when he was a kid in relation to an antique mirror. Now his sister has gotten in contact, saying she has managed to get a hold of that mirror, and she wants the two of them to prove the thing is haunted and thus responsible for ruining their childhood.
What is established early on is that the mirror (allegedly) has a means of messing with people's perception of the real world. That means that although the two siblings have gone to great lengths to provide a bunch of fail safes, including a deadman switch that will smash the mirror, none of these will work if the mirror simply tricks them into thinking they've worked. This apparently never occurred to them before setting up the elaborate experiment. Guess what happens.
This is a ghost story, and I'm a sucker for cool ghosts, especially if the movie doesn't do the boring thing of making the ghosts screw around for two hours, possess someone, and then get exorcised. This movie does have cool looking ghosts, but they don't fit very well into the story. They just sort of hang around, grinning malevolently whilst the mirror itself seems to do all the actual work. We're never given a reason for why the mirror is being evil, and this isn’t a problem; many a great horror movies has been made involving an intangible, unexplained evil. But it does need explaining why the hell there are all these other ghost assholes keep showing up, stealing the mirror's thunder.
The bigger problem though is that for all its atmosphere and style, the movie very quickly boils down to a routine of one character trying to do something, only to realise (to their continuing horror) that they didn’t do that thing but some other thing whilst under influence. A movie can only play the surprise dream sequence card once before it starts to piss off the audience, and this movie essentially does it non-stop.
When any given moment of the movie can be imaginary you stop being invested, because you know you're just being jerked around. Oculus has plenty of scares, but the movie does not leave you in any way satisfied afterwards because it never gets tired of cheating the viewer to tell its story.