Before he was a master of horror as the creator of acclaimed limited series like “The Haunting of Hill House” and “Midnight Mass” and the director of multiple Stephen King adaptations, Mike Flanagan was just another hard-working indie filmmaker getting a shot at a slightly bigger budget for his second film. After drawing attention for his scrappy 2011 debut feature “Absentia,” Flanagan leveled up with 2013’s “Oculus,” an ingenious horror movie with a standout performance from Karen Gillan.
“Oculus” is a lot more streamlined than Flanagan’s later horror epics, but it indicates the level of talent and creativity he’d bring to those higher-profile projects, along with his ability to add a fresh perspective to familiar horror elements. I remember being unenthused at the prospect of another movie about a haunted mirror when I went to see “Oculus” in theaters, not being aware of Flanagan’s previous film.
There may not be anything new about the story of Russell siblings Kaylie (Gillan) and Tim (Brenton Thwaites) trying to destroy the cursed mirror that was responsible for the deaths of their parents, but Flanagan makes it feel exciting and immersive. With his TV-series version of King’s “Carrie” set to premiere in October on Prime Video, viewers can now look back to Flanagan’s filmmaking origins by streaming “Oculus” on Netflix.
‘Oculus’ builds effective terror from its simple premise
One of the best sequences in “Oculus” features Kaylie manically laying out the centuries-long history of deaths associated with the mirror known as the Lasser Glass. But that presentation begins with her noting that the mirror’s origins are a mystery, and Flanagan and co-writer Jeff Howard aren’t interested in creating mythology for this cursed object, as so many horror movies feel obligated to do. Bad things happen to anyone who takes this mirror into their home, and that’s all the Russells and the audience need to know.
“Oculus” shifts back and forth between two time periods, and despite the onscreen text first indicating “Eleven years earlier,” the distinction between them becomes increasingly fluid as the movie goes on. That’s one of the film’s greatest strengths, as it disorients the audience in the same way that Kaylie and Tim are disoriented by the mirror’s influence. It’s natural for viewers to attempt to keep track of the two different narrative threads, but eventually it becomes impossible to tell what’s real, what’s a memory, and what’s a hallucination.
The majority of the movie takes place inside the Russell family home, where they’ve just moved in 2002 and where Kaylie has meticulously set up a supposed trap for the mirror in 2013. At first, the mirror is just another new piece of furniture that Kaylie and Tim’s father, Alan (Rory Cochrane), has purchased to celebrate their move. It doesn’t enter the house in any sinister way, but it soon takes hold of Alan, who starts behaving strangely and possibly talking to the apparition of a dark-haired woman (Flanagan’s future wife and frequent collaborator Kate Siegel).
The mirror also affects Kaylie and Tim’s mother Marie (Katee Sackhoff), and the children (played at younger ages by Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan Ewald) end up living in fear inside their own house. The mirror drives Alan and Marie to murder, leaving the children as orphans and Tim locked up in a mental institution. When he’s released 11 years later, he’s now convinced that there was nothing supernatural involved in their parents’ death, while Kaylie has spent the intervening time becoming more and more obsessed with the mirror.
‘Oculus’ takes pleasure in its horrors
Although Kaylie is determined to destroy the mirror, she’s almost perversely excited by its malevolence, especially since Tim initially scoffs at her assertions of its supernatural properties. She’s set up multiple alarms, cameras and other fail-safes (including a giant kill switch) to keep the mirror from harming them, even going so far as to bring a sacrificial dog to feed its hunger for life and place it on the offensive. She seems more eager about being vindicated than about defeating evil, and of course that hubris provides her downfall.
Gillan gives a gloriously unhinged performance, sharply whipping her ponytail around as Kaylie glides through the house, making sure everything goes exactly as planned. Her smug confidence almost never wavers, even as her carefully laid plans start falling apart, and in a movie with no tangible villain, she provides the requisite deranged energy. Cochrane and Sackhoff are suitably creepy as the parents who start to lose their own grips on reality, and the cumulative effect leads the audience to question the every character’s sanity.
Flanagan himself edited “Oculus,” which is a master-class in cross-cutting as it barrels toward its finale, the past and present completely dissolving into each other. There are none of the lengthy, florid monologues that would define Flanagan’s later work, although there is plenty of the family dysfunction that he explores in his subsequent series.
It’s all condensed into an elegant, eerie story about one of the genre’s most overused plot devices, proving that Flanagan has always had the ability to make timeless horror feel new again.
Stream “Oculus” on Netflix now