OCULUS

Brothers Kaylie and Tim Russell witnessed a terrible murder/suicide as children, in which their father killed their mother and then took his own life. At least that's what the kids told the authorities, adding that their father was under the influence of an evil force trapped in an ancient mirror in his study. But the children were not believed, and the deaths were blamed on little Tim, who was sent to a reformatory and followed by a psychiatrist, while his sister Kaylie was placed in a foster home. Ten years later, Tim, now an adult, is released from prison and reunites with his sister, who in the meantime has been obsessed with that episode and has managed to track down the famous mirror, which ended up at auction. Kaylie's goal is to lock herself inside the house where the tragedy occurred and document, through video cameras, the truth of the curse linked to the mirror, which, over the years, seems to have claimed victims in every place where it has been relegated. Mirrors seem to have a particular affinity with the horror genre, these "diabolical" objects that propose a double of everything that stands before them, which invert right with left but not up with down. According to a popular belief, for example, it is customary to cover mirrors with a cloth in the room where a wake is held to prevent the soul of the deceased from leaving the earthly world through the reflective surface, which becomes a real portal to the afterlife, just as some cultures believe that mirrors have the power to trap the soul of those who reflect in them. It is therefore easy to associate this "mysterious" object with the horror and fantasy tradition, to the point that in several films - not to mention novels - mirrors have become mephistophelian passages to the unknown. Some famous examples: the third episode of "Nightmare Alley" (1945), with the mirror as a gateway to another dimension, the first episode of "The Shop That Sold Death" (1973), with the evil entity that inhabits the mirror, "Mirror - Who Lives in That Mirror?" (1980), in which a mirror absorbs the evil, or the more recent "Into the Mirror" (2003), where mirrors are a means of communicating with the dead, which generated an American remake, "Reflections of Fear" (2008) and its sequel (2010). Mike Flanagan connects precisely to this mini-genre with "Oculus", which was born as a short film in 2006 and became a feature film in 2014. With the short, Flanagan had a simple but effective idea that perfectly suited the needs of the short duration, concentrating everything in a room, with a single character and a cursed mirror on which to perform an experiment that could demonstrate the evil powers of the object. In the feature film, commissioned by the director by Intrepid Pictures after the success of this short film and the low-budget film "Absentia", the experiment represents precisely the core of the story, but one perceives in a cumbersome manner the expansion of a story that is born and dies to be developed in a few minutes. The device of telling the past in parallel, with the death of the protagonists' parents, with the present, does little to help, as the feeling one has is always that of having wanted to unnecessarily prolong a story that is really very thin. If the short, moreover, was based on a fairly original story, "Oculus" appears to us as a rather brazen mix of the episode of "The Shop That Sold Death" and "Mirror - Who Lives in That Mirror?", since from the former it takes the powers with which the mirror is endowed and from the latter the story of the traumatized siblings who witnessed a murder. To this is added some intrusive ghostly presence and a couple of shock scenes that timidly aim at gore. In "Oculus" there is completely lacking the tension, the perception of danger, since the mirror does not manage to emerge as a threat, there is lacking a final climax and above all there is lacking the rhythm. An involuntary game of subtraction that makes it a flat work that will hardly be remembered. Then, as happens with those films that nevertheless carry a certain dignity as a low-budget work, there are not lacking some effective insights and it is entertaining the use of elements that can prove the power of the mirror, such as the plants that wilt in its radius of action and the dogs as the preferred dish of the Evil that lives in that object. The choice to confuse at a certain point the temporal planes, thus justifying the narration in flashback, is a good insight and the scene of the light bulb manages to create that indispensable dose of horror. Cast of faces known to the television audience with the protagonist, the beautiful Karen Gillan, who comes from "Doctor Who", Rory Cochrane of "24" as her father and Katee Sackhoff of "Battlestar Galactica" as her mother. This "Oculus" is not very convincing, therefore, which rather than reviving the mini-genre of cursed mirrors goes to show all the limits of a film that is born from an idea too small expanded in a clumsy manner.