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"Oculus" (2013) directed by Mike Flanagan is a little dumb but is ultimately pretty scary and interesting making it worth your time. It's just unfortunate that this one does not have a tight story whatsoever and is plagued with constant distracting predictable flashbacks.

Kaylie Russell (Karen Gillan) was traumatized as a child when her brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites) was forced to shoot and kill their father Alan (Rory Cochrane). Tim had to shoot his dad because the father had just finished executing their mother Marie (Katee Sackhoff) and was in the middle of strangling Kaylie. Now an adult, Kaylie intends to prove that both her father and brother were innocent in these killings because they were under the possession of some sort of supernatural presence which resides in a cursed mirror dating back several hundreds of years. Tim is released from a psychiatric hospital and is coerced by a childhood promise he made to his sister to return to their house and confront the ghost behind the mirror.

Oculus is definitely an effective original horror film that works for the most part. The designs of the undead are genuinely very scary here and this is not a film for the faint hearted. The actors perform incredibly well too, with no weak links among them. The premise is extremely strong and interesting, and in general the first half of the film is very good due to the meticulous planning setup and dread of what is to come.

Where the film fails is when trying to have any sense of logic or believability. This mirror is very literally just a physical object that can be destroyed, we even learn that it has a specific radius in which it can cause people to hallucinate and misplace them, so all you would have to do is create some distance and shoot it with something; problem solved. Another major error was the storytelling method being so heavily reliant on flashbacks. We as an audience already know exactly what happened to them as kids, so constantly flashing back to the past to show us is simply distracting me from the currently happening events which are much more interesting.

Oculus is good but far from perfect. I would recommend seeing it at least once at some point if you can handle the frights.

Video by Rainy Nights.

#movies #films #mikeflanagan