Oculus

(2013) ★★★½

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It’s taken ten years, but she’s found it. The day before her brother is released from a mental facility. This mirror – an ornate antiquity known as the Lasser Glass – evidently wanted to be found. Karen Gillan holds the object responsible for her parents’ horrific descent into insanity and death. Her disturbed brother Brenton Thwaites isn’t entirely sold: “What’s more likely? That you’re misremembering events from 11 years ago or that the mirror eats dogs?” Madness and obsession given an Amityville mirror sheen by Absentia director Mike Flanagan, a man who knows how to raise insidious shivers. Like The Pact and The Babadook, it’s one of the new ‘proper’ horrors (none of that credulous found-footage stuff) that’s coincidentally been developed from a short film. This one’s so gripping because the emphasis is as much on the psychosis as on the succubus and the supernatural.

Certificate: 15
Duration: 104min