Oculus

There is a certain sweet-spot when it comes to horror movies and how smart they are. More often than not their IQ is in the basement and we’re left with something annoyingly dumb and easily dismissive. Oculus, on the other hand, has the opposite problem; it really is too smart for its own good.

Tim (Home and Away’s Brenton Thwaites) has just turned 21 and is released from a psych ward for the underage, having murdered his father at a very young age. He’s collected by his older sister Kaylie (Doctor Who’s Karen Gillan), who promptly reminds him that he didn’t actually murder his father, but it was all the work of haunted mirror.

From there, the film jumps back to them as kids, dealing with their parents (CSI: Miami’s Rory Cochrane and Battleship Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff) slowly being driven insane back in the day, and current day Tim and Kaylie also having their mind’s warped by the evil reflective surface.

While the idea of a scary mirror sounds like a Z-list Stephen King novel, there is actually more going on Oculus than you’d expect from a horror movie, and to its detriment, probably more than there SHOULD be going on in a horror movie. The effects of trauma on memory and the blurring of mental issues with paranormal activity is dumped into the time-tripping story, and while it manages to be remain quite interesting throughout, it’s very rarely scary.

Gillan and Sackhoff are both pretty great in their roles, two women consumed by the mirror in two very different ways, while Thwaites does little more than play with his hair, and Cochrane is stuck with a Nice-Dad-Slowly-Goes-Mad role that we’ve seen done better a million times before. Writer/director Mike Flanagan brings a decent visual flare, with 95% of the action taking place within one house, it never gets repetitive.

There’s no getting over the fact that despite all the good work happening elsewhere, Oculus just never conjures up the scares or tension that a horror audience deserves. There’s no point in being a well-made horror movie if you’ve forgotten to bring any horror in the first place.