{"id":11234,"date":"2018-04-14T15:51:33","date_gmt":"2018-04-14T19:51:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=11234"},"modified":"2018-04-14T15:57:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-14T19:57:27","slug":"mom-was-always-home-oculus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2018\/04\/mom-was-always-home-oculus.html","title":{"rendered":"“Mom Was Always<\/i> Home”: Oculus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Oculus<\/em> is a time-bending, hallucination-filled tale of an old and evil mirror that destroys a family by making the dad do bad things. This sounds predictable, yes? \u201cThe Shining<\/em>, but cheesy,\u201d you\u2019re thinking. But that\u2019s a much apter comparison than it might seem. Oculus<\/em> has Stephen King\u2019s ability to capture the real emotional dynamics in violent families. What starts out as a fairly ordinary paranormal-or-madness? tale turns into a jagged meditation on what it\u2019s like to survive child abuse.<\/p>\n

Oculus<\/em> begins when Tim (Brenton Thwaites as an adult, Garrett Ryan as a child) is released from the mental hospital where he\u2019s been held involuntarily since the night he, possibly, killed his father. He reconnects with his sister Kaylie (adult Karen Gillan and child Annalise Basso) and learns that she is still convinced that what happened to them was not ordinary family violence, but supernatural evil. Like the children of Derry she still remembers the promise she and her brother made on that night long ago, and she is determined to destroy the evil mirror. But first, she has to prove its power\u2013and so she has to wake it up\u2026.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a smart<\/em> setup, it follows its own rules, and horror fans will especially appreciate the moment when you realize this could\u2019ve been a contrived found-footage film and absolutely will not be that. The technology is used sometimes for irony, sometimes to show you how determined and sharp-witted Kaylie is, and sometimes to show you how totally helpless a child can be. (\u201cYou need to get your father to call\u201d is one of the film\u2019s most frightening lines; it\u2019s one of the lines most rooted in realism.) The mirror is a terrific presence. You feel its mobile malevolence.<\/p>\n

The acting is uneven. Neither of the adult siblings\u2019 actors is as good as the raw, believable child actors they replaced. Gillan starts out especially wooden, but loosens up and becomes compelling about a half-hour in. Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck!) is excellent as their disintegrating mom, Rory Cochrane solid in the very difficult role of a man who has to be equally believable as a loving father and as an abusive tyrant. The actual \u201coculus\u201d effect and its accompanying scary makeup is indeed quite cheesy, and I basically was scared whenever that stuff wasn\u2019t<\/em> happening but couldn\u2019t be scared while it was. But I\u2019ll say that writer\/director Mike Flanagan handles two simultaneous and interweaving timelines perfectly\u2013you\u2019ll never be confused as to what\u2019s happening unless you should be.<\/p>\n

This seems like a movie that should have a sequel, or a prequel or a something<\/em>. (What it got instead was a Bollywood remake<\/a>! No lie.) It\u2019s not that I want explanations. And in a certain way the movie works best as a closed circle: By the end you\u2019ll see why the evil object is, specifically, that oval ourobouros mirror. But the action here is so tightly-constrained in time and place that it made me want to know whether the mirror radically changes people, overriding them completely, or whether like the Overlook Hotel it draws out what was always, unacknowledged, hiding within the family.<\/p>\n

The specific line that made me wonder about this is when the adult siblings are trying to check their memories of a particular incident, and Kaylie asks, \u201cWas mom at home?\u201d Tim replies, with an edge of anger and disgust, \u201cMom was always<\/em> home.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s true. Their mom never leaves the house! That\u2019s not normal. Was that normal for them? Was there already that hermetic shell over the secrets of an unhappy or abusive home? We don\u2019t see enough to really guess. But it\u2019s yet another of the movie\u2019s insights that it doesn\u2019t hammer on this, doesn\u2019t lecture us about the mom stuck in her housetrap, it just gives us this one line and lets us feel how distorted and sad it is.<\/p>\n

I think I heard about this movie when it came out, but like a fool I took a pass until the Deadly Doll praised it. She and a cohost discuss its resonance for abuse survivors here<\/a>, starting roughly at the 1 hr 8 mins mark and going until about 1:15. That link includes what I would consider spoilers, but it\u2019s worth checking out once you\u2019ve seen the film.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oculus is a time-bending, hallucination-filled tale of an old and evil mirror that destroys a family by making the dad do bad things. This sounds predictable, yes? \u201cThe Shining, but cheesy,\u201d you\u2019re thinking. But that\u2019s a much apter comparison than it might seem. Oculus has Stephen King\u2019s ability to capture the real emotional dynamics in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[17,119,322],"class_list":["post-11234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","tag-children-will-listen","tag-horror","tag-stephen-king"],"yoast_head":"\n"Mom Was Always Home": Oculus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Oculus is a time-bending, hallucination-filled tale of an old and evil mirror that destroys a family by making the dad do bad things. 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