Never Buy Antiques

I don’t generally care for ghost movies. Well, really, ghost or demonic possession movies as, generally speaking, they tend to all follow the same beats. People move into a house, there’s a spirit there that haunts the place, someone falls prey to the ghost’s power, they become possessed. Then you insert a bunch of easy to expect jump scares, low lighting, creepy music, and recycle the same beats over and over until the people flee the house and you roll the credits. Easily ninety percent of the time that’s all these films are able to do, and for some reason people eat them up.

Just look at the run of Paranormal Activity films, which just keep going and, near as I can see, operate the same basic outline of story and beats over and over again. The same goes for The Conjuring and all the spin-offs. And I’m not saying they don’t work for some people. Clearly these films are finding an audience that enjoys them, and if that works then great. I don’t much care for them, though, because the kinds of scares they try for I don’t find very effective, and I really dislike all the storytelling that goes on around with it. I find these kinds of films boring.

Generally, that is. Every once in a while, though, one of these films makes it through and I end up watching them and enjoying them. Usually that’s because the films find some kind of weird hook that I haven’t seen before, and because of that I actually end up getting invested in what’s going on. Something new and surprising is cool to see, and while most films don’t know how to add an interesting twist into the mix, when a film comes along and has that twist, I absolutely have to stop and take notice.

Such was the case for Oculus, a 2013 supernatural horror film that’s kind of a ghost story, kind of a possession tale, but also just this weird, mind-bending, time-warping tale that keeps you interested because you simply never know what’s going to happen next. The film twists and weaves on itself, keeping the audience constantly on their toes, shifting things around to add a new degree of doubt, a new sense that something’s not right. The film never lets up, building and building while twisting and weaving again, and by the end you’re both deeply invested and also horrified at the result. It’s a fucked up film that absolutely nails what it’s going for, start to finish.

Directed by Mike Flanagan and co-written by Flanagan and Jeff Howard, Oculus focuses on two siblings, older sister Kaylie Russell (played as an adult by Karen Gillan and as a pre-teen by Annalise Basso) and her younger brother Tim (played as an adult by Brenton Thwaites, and as a kid by Garrett Ryan Ewald). Time has just gotten out of a mental care facility after being remanded there by the courts for the last eleven years. Tim shot and killed his father, Alan (Rory Cochrane), an event that Kaylie swears wasn’t his fault while Tim swore up and down it was ghosts that made him do it. The courts decided Tim was crazy, and for those eleven years he was helped to get over his delusion.

Except Kaylie doesn’t think it was a delusion at all. She swears that it was an evil mirror, an antique, ornately framed, massive piece of glass and wood, that caused all the evil to happen. Their mother, Marie Russell (Katee Sackhoff), was tortured by their father, their father forced Tim to kill him, and there were spirits possessing both of them that led to the dark fate. So with Tim out of the hospital, Kaylie hatches a plan to document the evil of the mirror and show everyone, via video evidence, that the mirror is what really caused all the deaths. Except, once the two of them are locked in a house together, things start happening and the evil of the mirror begins to twist everything they know around on itself.

The best way to describe Oculus is less as a ghostly possession film and more as a time-twisting, mind-bending film. While ghosts appear and possessions occur in the film, all via the evil of the mirror, those are just part of the weirdness that occurs. What really sets the film apart is that it takes place across two time periods, one in the present with the adult versions of Kaylie and Tim trying to prove the mirror is evil and that it controls people and things, and the other side in the past, with the kid versions of the characters, as they watch their parents go crazy and become evil all because of the mirror.

And then time twists on itself. That’s the key of it all. The film doesn’t just show us two timelines, using one to inform the other; it actually has the characters begin to twist back and forth along their own timeline, seeing events again as kids, sometimes seeing themselves as kids and adult, and even using past events to inform present actions as the film loops and whorls and spins around along its story. It never stays in the same time period for two long, even bouncing up and down the timeline to show events a couple of times from different perspectives, all to keep us guessing as to what’s going on, if everything we see is real, and just how much we can trust the events as they play out.

That’s another trick the film plays: the characters themselves are unreliable narrators within their own scenes. One example happens early, when Tim and Kaylie have a fight, in their old house near the cursed mirror. Tim thinks Kaylie is crazy for still believing the mirror is evil (because he just spent eleven years in a hospital being told it’s not) and they go back and forth with each other about the plan. Once they head back into the room where the mirror is held, with all the equipment documenting it, they find that everything has moved and all the cameras are no longer pointed at the mirror. Why? When they watch back the footage they see themselves having the same fight, except they’re also moving all the equipment around and changing things. What we were shown of their actions before was false and their own perceptions couldn’t be trusted. And then the film does that again and again as well.

That’s what makes the film so interesting, and so freaky. You get deeply invested in the characters – who, it should be noted, are played fantastically by the adult and child actors – and want to see them succeed in their goal, proving the mirror is evil so it can be destroyed, but you also constantly doubt if anything they’re doing or seeing is even real. The mirror gets into their heads, and ours, and the story is constantly messing with us like it’s all an evil game. Which, considering the mirror sitting at the center of it all, it really is.

Plus, the film just has such great ambiance. There are some truly disturbing images in the film, especially once the souls of the damned that the mirror has claimed show up, and the movie is able to combine everything together – lighting, set design, movement and editing – so that the various parts come together in a truly creepy whole. I haven’t found many ghost films to be this effective with their storytelling, and that just proves that the idea Flanagan was working from (based on his own short film, “Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man with the Plan”) was solid enough to carry this kind of film in new directions and to new heights.

Oculus is the rare standout ghostly possession film that I actually really enjoy, and that's a testament to Flanagan and his storytelling skill. The man is a master of horror already (having worked on several other horror series and films, including The Haunting of Hill House, Gerald’s Game, and Doctor Sleep) and he’s absolutely a name to look out for just to see what he’s up to next. Oculus is a master class in horror storytelling, a film any true horror fan absolutely must watch, whether you like ghost stories or not.