Oculus Reviews

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since it was directed by Mike Flanagan, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even though it was a decent feature, you could see that, almost 10 years ago, Flanagan still had a long way to go before becoming one of the most interesting horror directors at work nowadays. The first thing that bothered was this major plot-hole about the fact that it seemed impossible that Kaylie would manage to get her hands on this mirror exactly when her brother Tim would get out of his psychiatric hospital. The other thing that bothered me, it’s not specific to this movie and it actually bugs me with many similar horror flicks, was that they developed some interesting ideas about the mental struggle faced by the main characters but, at some point, still decided to throw it all by the window for some paranormal stuff instead. Indeed, for once, you had a movie showing how messed up it was for this kid, but also his sister, to face such dramatic events at such a young age. Seriously, it took him 10 years to handle what happened and the message of this movie was basically that, not only it didn’t matter but what he learned in therapy was dealt with as if it was some major horsesh*t. I have to admit that I did like the approach chosen by Flanagan to mix up the timelines though, showing in the process what happened to Kaylie and Tim when they were kids and when they were older. In fact, it’s an approach he would further develop with ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ but it worked much better with this mini-series because he had more than 9 hours of running time at his disposal. Concerning Karen Gillan, sure, I have to admit that she was lovely as usual but I thought she was rather weak here and, in fact, except in comedies, I don’t think she is actually great in general (to be honest, Brenton Thwaites was probably even more underwhelming though). Anyway, to conclude, even though it was definitely a minor effort from Mike Flanagan, I have to admit that he did make the most of it though and it is worth a look, at least, if you really like the genre.