Oculus

In Oculus, the horror is at once deceptively simple and rooted in a deep, primal uneasiness. Its scariest aspects are universally familiar.

It's easily the scariest movie since "The Conjuring," and in some ways is a deeper and more satisfying film. It's stylish but not showy, more concerned with the thematic undercurrents coursing just beneath the surface.

Unsettling and well-acted story.

How do you get revenge on an inanimate object? That’s the quandary facing the characters in Oculus, a deeply silly and mildly effective horror movie.

A derivative but efficient chiller that cribs from “Solaris,” “The Shining” and “The Amityville Horror” yet also shows glimmers of imagination.

Oculus takes a potentially corny premise further than most could, but it keeps stumbling on the possibilities, never quite taking any of them all the way.

The result: a dangerously cracked creep flick.

I watched Oculus recently, having already seen some other Mike Flannigan movies, and he has yet to disappoint. Oculus is one of the best horror movies I have ever seen. It has an amazing lack of jump-scares to keep you on the edge of your seat. The acting was superb, and you can become invested in the story, considering the somewhat silly plot. From beginning to end, Oculus was a fantastic movie, and I recommend it to anyone who loves horror movies, and even others. It is not one of the scariest movies out there, but it has a really good story while adding scary elements to it.

A woman tries to exonerate her brother, who was convicted of murder, by proving that the crime was committed by a supernatural phenomenon. (6)

With its muddled narration, disorganized storytelling, choppy editing, distracting fast pace, and tons of ineffective cheap jump scares, I found the first act so messy and scrubby that I was about to stop watching the rest of the movie. Fortunately, almost everything got better after this unbearable 30 minutes, especially the editing which became one of the movie's merits notably when the movie shifts consistently between the past and the present. What didn't get better is the use of jump scares. Literally, there's no single jump scare that worked for me. That being said, Oculus is a quite scary movie due to its creepy atmosphere, brilliant visual structure, and seemingly nonsensical rules that would turn out to be very cogent. By that I mean due to Mike Flanagan's creative vision who directed and co-wrote the movie's screenplay. All the performance are fine, particularly the kids, but Annalise Basso's performance as Young Kaylie is what stands out for me. She is such a talented young actress. The characters of Kaylie and Tim have some reasonable depth, and the developments of the relationship between the two siblings raised a surprisingly interesting dilemma. The sound mixing and editing are top-notch, the thing that made some scary scenes so effective. Honestly, the ending isn't quite satisfying, and it made a sequel required, which we plainly won't get, but at least it didn't ruin the movie. (6.5/10)

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

This film could actually have been a decent one, if only the evil entity that the characters are fighting was actually beatable, but it's not and whatever they do to stop it inevitably fails becuase of the entity's peculiar power. I don't like it when there's no chance for the characters, it makes it all rather pointless. Also, the girl randomly decides to trust the entity towards the end, which makes no sense at all and this only happens because obviously whoever wrote this couldn't come up with anything better to end the story. Disappointing film.