Mirror, Mirror

Earlier this year, when commercials were running for the horror movie Oculus, it looked like an interesting enough premise to check out. Still, it took until recently on Blu-ray for me to actually do so.

I knew only a bit going in -- that Oculus was about a haunted mirror that corrupts the minds of those who gaze into it. As the film unfolded, I quickly learned that it featured two actresses with ample sci-fi cred. Karen Gillan will be remembered as Amy Pond on Doctor Who (and she also was wonderfully unrecognizable in Guardians of the Galaxy), while Katee Sackhoff played Starbuck on the Battlestar Galactica revival. The film also features Breton Thwaites (a young actor popping up a lot these days, who may or may not be the next new Big Thing) and Rory Cochrane (of CSI: Miami and a handful of interesting films including Argo).

After watching the film, I also learned that Oculus (like Mama before it) was actually a feature length expansion of an original short film. In making it, writer-director Mike Flanagan made a couple of very smart choices. First, he rejected the notion to turn it into a "found footage" horror film. Apparently, several studios floated the suggestion to build the movie with that device, with at least one even offering him a contract contingent on that change. He turned it down and held out to make the movie his way, and it's better for it. Found footage is quite played out in horror for the time being, though it certainly would have made an alluring idea here, since one of the characters is trying to document the mirror's powers on video. But the harsh realities of the camera would have clashed utterly with the psychological uncertainties of the mirror's power.

Secondly, to expand the short film to feature length, Flanagan chose to split his narrative between two time frames -- a past in which two children watch their family crumble under the mirror's influence, and a present in which those two return as adults to try to destroy the mirror once and for all. The movie gets a lot of mileage out of abruptly switching back and forth between time frames, creating brief moments of uncertainty in which the audience is slightly confused about time and place -- just as characters influenced by the mirror are.

That said, though the film does have the right agenda for psychological thrills, it has a bit of a "bookend" problem. The setup doesn't quite make sense; with the main characters having experienced all of this before in the past, and the extreme precautions that one of them takes for their "rematch" against the mirror, it doesn't quite track that they leave anything to chance. And as for the ending? Well, I daresay I thought the movie was going somewhere, it went somewhere else, and I believe my ending was the superior one. (In my oh-so-scientific polling of two other friends who'd also seen the movie, 100% of people surveyed agreed that my ending would have been better.)

Still, watch this movie in the dark at home, and it might just stir up a few spine-tingling moments for you. I'd give it a B. Among horror lovers, that might be nearly as good as an A. (And if you do see it, then I suppose we could compare notes about that ending!)