The eyes have it.
(2013) Supernatural Horror (Relativity) Karen Gillan, Katee Sackhoff, Brandon Thwaites, James Lafferty, Rory Cochrane, Annalise Basso, Garrett Ryan, Kate Siegel, Katie Parker, Miguel Sandoval, Scott Graham, Michael J. Fourticq, Katie Parker, Justin Gordon, Bob Gebert, Brett Luciana Murray, Zak Jeffries, Courtney Bell, Elisa Victoria, Allison Boyd, Toni White. Directed by Mike Flanagan
It is not always easy to distinguish illusion from reality. Our reality is based on our perceptions, which in turn are based on electrical impulses to the brain that translate the senses – taste, touch, smell, sound and sight. If those electrical impulses are manipulated however, how does one tell the difference?
Tim Russell (Thwaites) has just been released from a psychiatric hospital, eleven years after he killed his father (Cochrane) who had in turn tortured and murdered his mother (Sackhoff). He is picked up by his sister Kaylee (Gillan) who has been busy over the past eleven years.
She blamed the killings on an antique mirror that their dad had purchased to decorate the office. In the days they had owned the mirror, young Kaylee (Basso) and young Tim (Ryan) had watched both mom and dad slowly turn psychotic. Plants died, their dog disappeared and both parents had turned from loving and supportive to paranoid and cruel. They had begun to see things – visions of a haunting woman whose eyes were like mirrors.
Kaylee is determined to prove her family’s innocence; she had spent eleven years painstakingly and obsessively researching the mirror and discovered that over the centuries since it was created, the Lasser Glass (as the mirror is known) had been around during literally dozens of murders and bizarre deaths. Kaylee believes the mirror is possessed by some sort of demonic spirit and means to destroy the mirror once and for all.
Tim on the other hand wants nothing to do with it; he has spent the last eleven years learning to convince himself that nothing supernatural had occurred, that it was all a product of his young mild trying to cope with horrific – but terrestrial – events. Now, in their old family home with the mirror and a failsafe “kill switch” that they must reset every 30 minutes or a weighted anchor will smash into the mirror and end its reign of terror, past and present begin to blur and the two survivors of the first attack might not be so lucky this time around.
Flanagan has crafted one of the great mind benders of all time here. Throughout the second half of the film, I was questioning everything, thinking that this could be an illusion, or the whole thing could be an illusion and the adult Russells were really the child Russells being placated while their possessed parents came to kill them. Any outcome is possible and you don’t know which one it’s going to be, adding to the fun.
Gillan, better known as Amy Pond in the Dr. Who series, is terrific here in a character distinctly unlike the grounded Amy. Kaylee is barely holding it together, haunted by ghosts both literal and figurative. Gillan has a great deal of screen presence that holds up on the big screen as well (or maybe even better than) on the small screen. While her name value is liable to attract die-hard Whovians to a film they might not otherwise have been interested in, she will benefit in being exposed to a whole new audience who is likely to embrace her as fanatically as her previous fan base has.
Thwaites, who will also be starring in the sci-fi film The Giver this fall, also has a bright cinematic future ahead of him. He has the kind of quiet charisma that reminds me of a young Gary Cooper, minus the mannerisms. His star quality is more subtle than Gillan’s who wears her s on her sleeve, but no less intense.
Flanagan does a masterful job of keeping the two time periods parallel until the very end when he bleeds one into the other, with the adult actors appearing in the past and the young actors in the present, sometimes both together. We are also left guessing whether what we’re seeing and hearing is real or the product of the mirror and the confusion and terror of the characters is well communicated to the audience who feels their emotions. That’s all you can ask out of any director.
This has franchise potential written all over it and while the ending of the film is pretty much a given (it is telegraphed early on, giving the audience the impression that the mirror is toying with its prey), it is still satisfying. There isn’t a lot of gore here but there is some and what there is most gore fans are going to be satisfied with. Mostly this movie is about a royal mind blowing and one can be forgiven if they walk away from this moving doubting their own senses. I know I did.
REASONS TO GO: Awesome mindf**k. Gillan shows big screen potential.
REASONS TO STAY: Some fairly lengthy “dead” periods.
FAMILY VALUES: Plenty of horrific images and supernatural violence, some pretty serious mind bending and a bit of brief bad language.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Flanagan earlier made a short, also titled Oculus on which this feature is based.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 4/24/14: Rotten Tomatoes: 71% positive reviews. Metacritic: 61/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Mirrors
FINAL RATING: 7/10
NEXT: For No Good Reason
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