Oculus

So there's an evil mirror. It feeds off the energy around it. Lights, plants, animals, people. It also can mess with the perceptions of people, twist them around, make them do things. Harm themselves, harm their families. For the Russell family, it originally ended with the parents dead, Kaylie adopted, and Tim in a mental ward for killing his father. Tim's out, having repressed everything about the evil mirror, but Kaylie's determined to exonerate him and destroy the mirror, and sets up this elaborate system of cameras, alarms, scheduled phone calls and food breaks.

It's a frustrating movie*, because there are a couple of places early where it lays out why neither character should be doing this, and then they both keep doing it. Tim's doctor reminds him that he needs to focus, first and foremost, on his own recovery. And Kaylie sees things in the mirror's reflection before she even gets it to the location she's prepared. Which should have been a tipoff it wasn't as weak as she's telling herself.

But the film does work to help you understand why they ignore those warning signs until it's too late to matter. Kaylie is all the family Tim has left, and to his eyes initially, she's nuts. So he needs to help her. For Kaylie, she probably spent years hearing adults whispering to themselves about the poor child whose brother went crazy and killed their parents, dealing with all the shit that would come with that. OK, the movie never says that part explicitly, but it seems a reasonable conclusion.

There's some decent, I wouldn't call them scares, but moments where you go, "OH" and wince. Although the mirror is playing with their perceptions of what's happening so much that I lost track of what was actually supposed to be happening, versus what they thought was happening. So you can't tell if any of it is real, which dampens the impact somewhat. It helps if you remind yourself that supposedly, every moment this thing has them running through the maze of their own minds, it's getting stronger. And the movie is constantly cutting to flashbacks of what happened the first time around to remind you why that's a bad thing.

Actually, the flashbacks overlap with the present, which started to confuse me. It seemed like present Kaylie and Tim were seeing their child selves, but sometimes it seemed as though their child selves saw them, too? I started to think the mirror could bend time itself, which I don't think was the intent.

* It's also frustrating because I don't normally like horror movies where the evil thing wins. Unless I hate all the so-called protagonists, but that wasn't the case here. I try not to watch movies where I hate all the people we're supposed to care about.