Oculus

Oculus is a well-made and fairly frightening horror film released in 2012 and directed by Mike Flanagan.  (Flanagan is the current enfant terrible in the horror movie industry -- he has since directed another four or five films since Oculus  and in its November 2017 edition, Entertainment Weekly acclaimed his films as the "best kept secret" in the genre.)  With this feature film, Flanagan adapts for the big screen a student picture -- a short made with only one character and an antique mirror; this short subject was also acclaimed and, apparently, a favorite at festivals.  Oculus is story about murderous ghosts.  The ghosts emerge from an antique mirror -- according the back-story, more than 40 deaths, most of them by self-mutilation have resulted from the monstrous influence of the mirror.  Flanagan seems to work quickly and very, very cheaply.  Although the movie is scary, the suspense is all based on the things jumping out at the characters from the edge of the frame -- in technical terms, Flanagan keeps the off-screen space around his camera full of fearsome, but unseen, monsters.  The creatures are only momentarily visible -- this is both cost-efficient, and effective, because the creatures themselves, shambling entities with weird LED eyes and pale boneless bodies like corpses long drowned, are underwhelming:  the ghosts pay homage to innumerable Japanese films and have pallid skin and long, wet-looking stringy hair.  Horror films are derivative and Flanagan's movie bears a vague resemblance to Kubrick's The Shining -- two children, a suburban  Hansel and Gretel, struggle to survive when their parents go slowly, and horribly, mad.  Curiously, the film also bears a faint resemblance to Rivette's Celine and Julie go Boating -- in a haunted house, a family is tearing itself to shreds and specters, in the case of Oculus, the children as they are now grown up, appear to both obsessively re-enact the family tragedy in the hope of redirecting the lethal past into something less toxic.  The film is curiously static for its first 40 minutes and shows some significant promise:  a young man has been released from a sanitarium where he has been confined as a lunatic.   The young man is said to have shot his father, possibly because he tortured the boy's mother to death; his sister somehow survived the ordeal but is obsessed with vindicating her brother from culpability.  The young man has been convinced by his kindly therapist, played wonderfully by the very reassuring Miguel Sandoval, that nothing supernatural occurred -- the cruelties that the young man witnessed were all the result of the dysfunction in the family arising from the insane hatred between mother and father.  By contrast, the young man's plucky sister, now employed as an antique dealer, is convinced that he misery in the household was caused by ghosts emerging from the sinister mirror.  The girl acquires the mirror, places it in the family's deserted house, and sets up a complicated system of cameras and sensors to record the havoc caused by the large reflecting glass.  The young man has been brainwashed into thinking that nothing uncanny occurred in the days leading up to his shooting of his father and he and his sister debate, at length, the meaning of the events that they experienced during their childhood.  This plot yields numerous flashbacks.  The film's innovation is make the flashbacks ultimately indistinguishable from what is happening in the film's "present tense" -- in some shots, we see the characters as they look today, peering across the room at the little boy and girl struggling with the monsters in the haunted house.  It's all very clever, pretty frightening, and effectively acted.  For a horror film, the picture is surprisingly "talky" -- for the first 40 minutes, the movie is a primarily a debate between the main characters as to whether the allegedly supernatural events twelve years earlier have a purely natural explanation.  This is by far the best part of the picture -- once the ghosts appear and are established unequivocally present, the film devolves into the adults running from one dark room to another with blood pouring from various wounds while the children do the same in the parallel story 12 years earlier as shown in parallel-staged flashbacks.  It's unenlightening, scary on a visceral level (bogeymen keep popping out at you), and deeply unpleasant, particularly to the see the helplessness and terror of the children as their parents relentlessly try to butcher them.  I can't think of any reason why you would want to see this picture.