Not your average horror flick: NOT walking around in the dark.

Illusion Occlusion.

It’s all done with mirrors!

A haunted mirror. A spinner redhead. A ship’s anchor. Things in a chilling, original, truly eerie horror movie. Is it real, or is it OCULUS? There is no escape from what you think you see. Kinda like TMZ.

Feisty Kaylie Russell (Karen Gillan) tries to destroy an antique mirror from her childhood, claiming it was the cause of her parents’ insanity and their violent deaths. She enlists the aid of younger brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites), recently released from a psyche ward for being hunky.

Poffulus

Kaylie has traced 45 mirror-related deaths back two centuries, up to her parents’ deaths, and this is where the film slips up slightly: she’s too clinical. As she documents her exhaustive research on video – which is commendable for its scientific method – we ask whether she had to do it all at once in this grandiloquent exposition-fest. Her manner is officious, she is overly talkative… But that hair! She knows. The filmmakers know. And YOU know as well. Those firestorm follicles – we’ll forgive damn near anything for a frolic in those lubricious locks. You wanna talk shop? Talk away, flamey!

Directed and co-written by Mike Flanagan, OCULUS comes at us with a plausible, scientific tone (which is why it obviously failed at the box office – people are idiots). Kaylie doesn’t arbitrarily accuse “the mirror” of killing people, but of some kind of influence the custom glass might have had on its owners, stating that the word “supernatural” has no place in a scientific study like this, but speculating that there might be inexplicable forces at work that she might not have any other name for. And look at my hair.

Hunky bro is the skeptic, having been brainwashed by The Man in an institution, all imagination leached out of him, so trying to conform to platitudinous “I am okay, everything’s okay” standards. Though he was also terrorized by the mirror as a child, ten years in an institution has occluded his fearful memories. They say he’s cured – but they’ve repressed him more than ever. (Kaylie: “You were normal when you went in – now you’re a nutjob!”)

Kaylie sets up an isolation room with cameras, computers, alarms, food, regular phone calls to her fiancé, and an anchor jerry-rigged to fall and smash the mirror if she doesn’t reset it at regular intervals. Now – I know what you’re thinking: If this mirror is as malevolent as she thinks it is, why not smash it RIGHT NOW? The answer is simple: no matter how many precautions Kaylie thinks she has taken against the mirror, it is already inside her mind; has been since she was a child…

I’m too sexy for my reflection…

Movie freely jumps back and forth in non-chrono order, showing Kaylie and Tim as kids (played with excellent terror by Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan), where we see the fatal effects of Kaylie’s father bringing the mirror into their new home. (Rory Cochrane plays dad, whose casualness reminds us of Ron Livingstone from OFFICE SPACE.) Mom goes nuts by looking into the glass (Katee Sackhoff) and dad (who has also gone nuts with the mirror in his office) shoots her – and Tim shoots dad. And then goes nuts via natural means – by being sent to an institution.

It might seem like a gore-fest but it is not. It’s a classic horror tale that eschews serial killers (unless you count the mirror), avoids gore (unless you count the anchor through the skull), and is devoid of jump scares! That’s right, a modern psychological thriller with no bleating orchestra stabs whenever things appear unexpectedly from offscreen.