Oculus

Synopsis : 'A woman tries to exonerate her brother, who was convicted of murder, by proving that the crime was committed by a supernatural phenomenon'.

Despite first-hand speculation, Oculus isn't your average scary movie although its genre is definitely standard horror. Oculus is a reflexive act on the form of horror without the overweight of an allegory, which has always been the magic screwdriver behind the Pop mechanism. The film starts as a sequel, from a film you haven't seen but certainly from an archetypal pound of the haunted object subgenre: here, some distant relative to some killer in a mirror, or any aggravating Poe's cheerfulness. By straightforwardly cutting to the second episode of this arc, it eases the mind, and also it makes a difficult promise to keep, that it is innovative enough not to bother with a classical origin story ; in a way that you won't suffer the code but only enjoy the entertainment coming from the archetype, only the Dark Knight without Batman Begins if you like.

The narrative strength is this, Oculus starts from the sequel intercalated in the prequel. You could call it flashbacks but why use these flashbacks since you already know what happened in the past through the premise ? In fact, it does better than flashbacks. Both of these storylines will fuel each other until they become one overpowered engine. What could be Oculus's downfall becomes its grace when it chooses to integrate both storylines at once, until they mix so deep that they echo their brutal respective end. Fatality will ensue.

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Is the mirror actually doing something ? Even with its nasty resumé of demonic doings, it seems only to act with people complicit (it dehydrates, people forget to eat, which is the main job of a good reflection in a way). Take narcissism for instance: is it a narcissic reflection acting on you or are you acting narcissic? That's another hard promise from the movie. You will see monsters, corpses and ghosts the mirror have ended up possessing, but everything could just be a matter of perception. Only the being acts, not the objects. Maybe a haunted object is able to invade your mind when you're in relation with it, but it's powerless on its own. It needs you. A doll would have been a powerless object on that matter, but a mirror ? In it there's only a reflection, your act, the desired landscape you put in front of him. Only this time it's a pretentious one, as the tagline blare : 'you see what it wants you to see.'

The Mike Flanagan and Jeff Howard script never make it sound Kubrickian or allegoric because it's an entertainment business. So it's very quick at telling, without suspending its rythm over equally deserving points : is the father a serial killer ? Are the kids really making a propaganda to unguilt the fact they killed their father after he killed their mother ? Is it just only the clockwork orange family ? Cold as the eye of a murderer, it keeps advancing to its inevitable purpose.

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Mike Flanagan had made a short film I haven't seen, called 'Oculus 3', back in 2006, where he created that plot, of someone trying to prove there's a supernatural force in the mirror, and that it is responsible for killings. Time serves writing well, as it does with maturity. The plot certainly gained a lot of ease over its conceptualism, to fully deliver its most primitive and brutal potential. The design of the Oculus narrative, which seem effortless, is as elusive to create as it is truly brilliant to watch.

In truth, I think it would be close to impossible to come up with this writing without an instinct beyond technique. It comes deep from an unexplainable spark of genius. Take a pen and a white page, you will be closer to write Conjuring 2 than any Oculus film. It will be lightyears of rewrite and reflexivity in front of you before that.

No one asked Oculus to be that good, I suppose not even the Insidious and Paranormal Activity producers behind Oculus. It just needed to be a house and a mirror with ghosts, a-la James Wan from recent memory (who does his job extremely well). That's where Oculus hits. How come ? How come it is that good ? On a personal perspective, I left the theater still shackled to the Oculus like a prisoner to his steel chair. Was I hallucinating or have I really left the theater ? Added to the puzzlement of past and present, the doubts over wether events actually happen in the story triggered a reaction of perplexity over my own sensations  minutes after the credits rolled. Was it the film, or was it me ? The film certainly needed its audience to create that sensation.

At the end of all things, Oculus is a meta-horror-movie that doesn't feel meta, letting you deal with its maleficious architecture. And by being meta on horror, it ends up being meta about cinema itself.