I've never heard of Mike Flanagan and his short film, Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man with the Plan (an absurd title if there ever was one). But after seeing his big-budget remake, shortened simply to Oculus, I'll have to keep an eye out for this promising new horror director, whose film gave me the chills.
It's a fairly standard premise - a haunted object, passed down through generations, claims the lives of its owners, in this case a huge, Gothic mirror - but is carried out with a pleasingly inventive execution. Karen Gillan (surely one of the best things to come out of Doctor Who) and Brendon Thwaites play siblings who have to face up to their decidedly unhappy past. The latter has been recently released from a mental asylum, whereas the former is obsessed with finding out whether their big, scary childhood mirror possesses supernatural abilities, abilities which compelled her brother and father into committing terrible crimes. The film is interspersed with flashbacks but mostly takes place in their childhood home - particularly one room where Gillan sets up a complex series of cameras, in what appears to be a throwback to the single location of the frightening original.
If it wasn't already obvious from the title, Oculus is very much preoccupied with seeing things - what we see, what the camera sees, and how much of the story we can trust from the film's perspective. Is that shot objective, or are we seeing through the eyes of a character, whose mind is being manipulated and distorted by the mirror? Are we in the past or the present? The current-day antics and flashbacks soon begin to mesh together as the film goes on, and there are some startlingly nasty sequences throughout (one involving an apple will give you nightmares). It marks Oculus as a horror film which really utilises the power of cinema in delivering its frights - Flanagan is primarily an editor, but at no point does the film descend into jump-scares, instead relishing in the sense of dread and paranoia which precedes such things. Certainly some of the finest modern-day horror to come out of Hollywood, and I can't wait to see what he does next.
