Previously posted on blog and written by B. Demeter
Oculus (2013) stars people from Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica and was produced by the WWE. On top of that it is pretty good.
This movie is about a haunted mirror. Why and how it is haunted is never explained. An unsuspecting family acquires the mirror, which causes the mother and father to slowly lose their shit. The father kills the mother. The son kills the father. Son gets locked away in a mental facility and the daughter focuses her life on getting revenge on the mirror.
But I don’t want to get ahead of myself…
The movie is presented in back and forth time jumps between the grown up kids exacting revenge on the mirror and original family experience with the mirror. So you’re seeing the son getting out of treatment and the daughter getting the mirror and setting up the experiment then jump to the mother and father moving into the home and putting up the mirror.
The movie does a good job of not letting you know what is going on. There is a big difference between confusion due to bad writing and confusion due to an exciting story; and this movie definitely has an exciting story. At times you don’t know if the daughter is crazy or the son. Did the mother really go insane? Did the father kill the mother because she was insane or because he was? I have no answers to any of this and I was thoroughly entertained.
Two of the stars in this film are pop culture royalty. The mother is played by Katee Sackhoff; Starbuck from the Battlestar Galactica reboot. The adult daughter is played by Karen Gillian; Amy Pond from Doctor Who. I’m a fan of both of these series so I was well acquainted with these actresses. There is really no reason to mention this aside from just letting you know. The actresses were both great in the film. But maybe this is just a ‘me’ problem, if a film has Karen Gilliam and Katee Sackhoff in it and their characters aren’t named Amy Pond (possible) and Kara “Starbuck” Thrace (less likely) then there is a 0% chance I’m going to remember their names in the movie. However, if you’ve read any of my previous reviews you already know I’m terrible with character names- so this is definitely a ‘me’ problem.
One last plot point of note is Amy Pond sets up a mirror kill switch, which is an anchor on a chain attached to the ceiling. If she or her brother does not reset a timer every so often, the anchor will swing down and destroy the mirror. It is not the dumbest thing to have, but as soon as they set it up and explain it you know exactly how the movie is going to end. The rest of the movie is plenty entertaining but a bit more surprise for the ending would have been nice. They might as well have called it Chekhov’s anchor.
All in all I was very impressed with this movie. At times it had traces of Grave Encounters- another film that I very much enjoyed. Don’t expect a lot of explanation and just take it for the crazy, wild, deadly ride that it is.
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