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Add Mike Flanagan's "Oculus" to the horror subgenre of supernatural item movies. This time it's not a haunted doll or magical box but a deadly mirror with the power to compel people to commit violent acts. A man will think that he is trying to rip a Band-Aid from his finger only to realize that he's pulling his fingernail off instead. And that's nothing compared to what happens to teeth. The mirror has destroyed dozens of lives over the years, such as the time a mother thought she was tucking her children into bed but was drowning them in a cistern. "You see what it wants you to see", as the tagline goes. While the narrative freedom inherent in that premise allows for some truly strong visuals at times—the focus on star Karen Gillan 's bouncing red pony tail down a hall or a bloody hand hidden behind a doorframe—"Oculus" eventually becomes little more than a series of ghostly figures and twisted visions on its way to a cop-out of an ending that you'll see coming an hour away. Solid performances and a few memorable images save it from disaster but Flanagan's film left me longing for the movie it could have been instead of what it actually is.

When "Oculus" opens, Tim Russell ( Brenton Thwaites ) is being released from years of intensive therapy. Much like Daniel Lutz (whose life story became " The Amityville Horror "), Tim believed for most of his time in a padded cell that his father was forced to commit horrendous violence because of a supernatural force. His doctors, including Miguel Sandoval in a prologue cameo, reworked those memories to lead him to believe that dad was just a really bad guy and there was no supernatural mojo at work. And so Tim hesitantly leaves the hospital to reenter society. Maybe having lunch with his sister wasn't the best idea.

Not having the "benefit" of therapy, Tim's sis Kaylie (Karen Gillan of "Doctor Who") wastes almost no time pulling her brother back into the world that he has spent years trying to repress. Kaylie, who works at an auction house, has found the mirror. She steals the haunted antique, setting it up in the family home as the focus of a fantastic array of cameras, alarm clocks, temperature gauges, and even a giant swinging blade designed to finally destroy it. Before Kaylie is willing to put an end to the mirror's unholy reign, she wants to document and prove its power. Another bad idea.

For the entirety of "Oculus," the narrative cuts back and forth from the adult pair's efforts to ghostbust the mirror with what happened to them years earlier. Young Tim (Garret Ryan) and young Kaylie ( Annalise Basso ) moved into a lovely home with their father Alan ( Rory Cochrane ), a software designer, and their supportive mother Marie ( Katee Sackhoff ). And then Dad went antique shopping. With far too little set-up, pop goes off the mental rails and mom is left an inevitable victim. The flashbacks in "Oculus" have a depressing fatalism because we're told who will live and who will die early on, turning these scenes into an exercise in inevitable gore. The lack of suspense is more disheartening when one realizes that the hole hasn't been filled by any sort of social context at all. Films like " The Shining " and "The Amityville Horror" also trafficked in the inevitable but grounded their narratives in cautionary tales of how familial stress and other external factors like alcoholism can destroy a patriarch.

The "present day" material in "Oculus" is much more effective, thanks largely to a game performance from Gillan. She renders Kaylie as a driven woman on the edge of sanity herself. When she growls at the mirror, "You must be hungry," one can see the B-movie glory that "Oculus" could have been. Her younger brother got the treatment he needed but Kaylie was left to fight for the day she could get vengeance on the mirror that wrecked her life. Gillan sells that hair-trigger intensity in the film's best moments, and when Flanagan and co-writer Jeff Howard open the door to the however-brief possibility that Kaylie may actually be crazy, "Oculus" is at its most interesting.

Sadly, they can't maintain that intrigue past the second act. As so many of these ventures do, the final act of "Oculus" becomes an increasingly random series of scenes designed to push buttons instead of anything inherent to character or narrative. If there are no rules or relatable subtext within the world of a horror film, the images have no power. Both overly foreshadowed climactic acts of "Oculus"—they tell us over and over again that dad is going to go homicidal and that they're going to try to destroy the mirror—feel like genre faits accomplis and so their inevitability becomes little more than a shallow reflection of superior works.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Oculus (2014)

Rated R for terror, violence, some disturbing images and brief language

105 minutes

Karen Gillan as Kaylie Russell

Brenton Thwaites as Tim Russell

Katee Sackhoff as Marie Russell

Rory Cochrane as Alan Russell

Annalise Basso as Young Karen

Garretty Ryan as Young Tim

Miguel Sandoval as Dr. Shawn Graham

• Mike Flanagan
• Jeff Howard

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Review: Why ‘Oculus’ Is One of the Scariest American Horror Movies In Years

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“Oculus” is an exception. Appropriately being co-released by microbudget fear factory Blumhouse Production — its founder, Jason Blum , helped turn the scrappy productions “Paranormal Activity” and “The Purge” into profitable franchises — much of the new movie’s chilly atmosphere involves the experiences of two characters in a room with one very ominous mirror. As the haunted object plays tricks on its two would-be victims’ minds, the audience falls prey to the ruse as well. Director Mike Flanagan turns the fragile nature of consciousness into a better fear tactic than any visceral shocks could possibly achieve.

“Oculus” certainly relies on a familiar toolbox, including the occasional clichéd moment when something scary materializes right behind an unsuspecting character. But the specifics of the scenario engender a fundamental state of dread that grows heavier with each murky twist. Flanagan’s script, co-written by Jeff Howard and based on an earlier short film, nimbly moves between events that transpired 11 years ago and their ramifications in the present: In the opening scenes, 21-year-old Tim (Brenton Thwaites) is released from a psychotherapy ward after years on lockdown and reunited with his sister, Kaylie ( Karen Gillan ). With a steely resolve, she announces that the pair must return to the childhood home and “kill it” — a declaration that immediately establishes a menacing supernatural presence that remains hard to define throughout the movie.

But Flanagan quickly fills in a few more pertinent details: The siblings’ youth was disrupted with the arrival of the mirror into the claustrophobic study where their father (Rory Cochrane) worked alone; at some point, maybe because of his own lapsing sanity or maybe because the mirror drove him mad, their ill-fated father murdered their mother (Katee Sackhoff), at which point young Tim shot him dead. Kaylie has been waiting for her brother to reemerge into society so the two of them can confront the bizarre ancient menace, which is apparently responsible for 48 deaths in 400 years. As soon as he’s free, she snatches up the mirror at a local auction and brings him back to the scene of the crime, with camcorders set up to capture their every move over the course of one isolated, dreary night. In short order, plenty of things go bump in the night, but it’s gradually clear that nothing happening can be taken for granted, including Kaylie and Tim’s own behaviors. At its best, “Oculus” is a tightly enacted chamber drama that just happens to include supernatural phenomena. The mirror is messing with them at every turn — and, by extension, it’s messing with us.

The first sign that “Oculus” has more on its mind arrives as the adult Tim attempts to shrug off his sister’s recollections of supernatural occurrences with the “fuzzy trace” theory of human psychology — essentially, false memories derived from inaccurate associations: In Tim’s view, their dad was an unfaithful lunatic — hence the cryptic presence of another woman in his study after hours — and eventually went ballistic on his wife as a result of their marital tensions. His kids’ convictions about the nature of these events, the thinking goes, suggest a history of mental illness in the family.

And who’s to say whether Tim has it right? As the duo creep around the house, evading passing shadows and lashing out blindly in the wrong directions, it’s never entirely clear if any given point of view holds ground. “Oculus” keeps digging further into their frightened state, thickening the dreary atmosphere at every turn, so that even while the outcome of the scenario is fairly predictable early on, it’s continually haunting as it maps out a path to get there. A truly contemporary horror movie, its eeriness stems from manipulated cell phone conversations and recorded data on the ubiquitous cameras that may or may not accurately represent events as they transpire. No matter how much technology they have on their side, nothing in certain.

In recent years, few American genre films have managed the extreme spookiness found in many of their overseas brethren. Even while “Oculus” plays by the book in individual moments, it manages to invent a shrewder context for the events in question. It’s not the scenes that matter so much as the way they do (and don’t) fit together. It uses subjectivity like a weapon. By contrast, last year’s generally well-liked haunted house effort “The Conjuring” capably grappled with issues of faith, but failed to unite its bigger ideas with the rudimentary process for freaking us out.

In “Oculus,” the horror is at once deceptively simple and rooted in a deep, primal uneasiness. Its scariest aspects are universally familiar: By witnessing the two leads fall prey to the ghastly object’s manipulation, we too become its victims. Reflecting the way our greatest fears lie within our own insecurities, the mirror is an ideal metaphor for the horror genre’s lasting potency.

Criticwire Grade : A-

HOW WILL IT PLAY? Relativity opens “Oculus” nationwide this weekend. With little competition, it should find respectable returns among the sizable audience for horror films, although its primary audience lies on VOD, where it should be successful for a long time.

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Oculus: film review.

A brother and sister attempt to destroy the spirit-possessed mirror that killed their parents.

By THR Staff

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A brother and sister face off against the mysterious force that destroyed their childhood in Mike Flanagan ‘s Oculus , an effective little creeper that makes the most of its ghost-hunting conceit. Key art focusing on our heroes as young kids fails to capture the well-balanced nature of the yarn, which is as involving in its present-tense action as in the extended flashbacks showing the horrors that the children witnessed. But strong word-of-mouth should help genre fans find the picture, which has no fright-flick competition in theaters at the moment save for a Jim Jarmusch vampire film that will never be mistaken for fanboy fare. Sequels are a possibility, though screenwriters would be unable to reuse the devices responsible for much of this outing’s appeal.

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When they were young, Kaylie and Tim ( Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan ) were moved into a big new home by their parents ( Katee Sackhoff and Rory Cochrane ), who very soon succumbed to dark forces. While dad grew increasingly secretive and distracted, spending all his time locked in his home office, mom went insane. When she grew so dangerous that she threatened the children, dad killed her in a domestic struggle. Tim, traumatized, shot him dead.

The Bottom Line Enjoyable ghost story makes good use of clashing perspectives.

Or so Tim’s shrinks say. Upon his release from a mental institution 11 years later, authorities declare that Tim (now played by Brenton Thwaites ) “is a healthy adult” ready to reenter society. Kaylie ( Karen Gillan ), on the other hand, still believes in the version of events the children pieced together at the time: Their parents were controlled by a spirit residing in the beautiful, ornate mirror Dad bought for his new office, a mirror they tried and failed to break before it was sold in the aftermath of the killings.

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Now, having tracked down the mirror at an estate auction and returned it to its place in their old house, Kaylie intends to document its powers before destroying it with Tim’s help. She has turned the house into an elaborate observational machine, building ingenious countermeasures she thinks will record any paranormal activity, even if the mirror gets inside their heads, making them think they see things that aren’t there. While Tim argues with her plans, parroting the psychological explanations of events he has heard for years, she uses an array of video cameras and computers to recount the history of this evil looking glass — which has caused four centuries of deaths in the households that owned it — and prove its power is real.

Flanagan and co-writer Jeff Howard get good mileage out of Kaylie’s no-nonsense planning, demonstrating the strength of “the Lasser glass” by showing how she hopes to foil its efforts to protect itself; the certainty of Gillan’s performance introduces another layer of unease as the debate between the siblings heats up, leading us to wonder if Tim is right in his more prosaic explanation of events.

That possibility is thrown out in one of the film’s cleverest moments, which involves Kaylie’s recording equipment and the characters’ faltering hold on their senses. Given the importance of character-generated video here, it’s a relief the filmmakers chose not to rely on a found-footage conceit; for once, our heroes have an excellent reason to view all the action through cameras, but limiting the audience to those perspectives would have resulted in a more ordinary film.

As the scares pick up pace and ghost-induced hallucinations dominate the action, the past and present start to overlap with each other; the adults watch their younger selves enduring horrors they can’t undo. These visions have a poetic quality at first, but as they proliferate (and as more and more of the mirror’s victims materialize in the house), the film’s tension between objective and perceived realities loses some of its power. Having tasked us with the job of separating one from the other, Flanagan needs to preserve some shred of our hope that we can do so. If we lose that briefly, though, the story’s conclusion benefits from a closure that is satisfying despite — and even because of — its predictability.

Production: Intrepid Pictures, Blumhouse Productions, WWE Studios Cast: Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff, Rory Cochrane, Annalise Basso, Garrett Ryan, James Lafferty, Miguel Sandoval, Kate Siegel Director-Editor: Mike Flanagan Screenwriters: Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard Producers: Marc D. Evans, Trevor Macy Executive producers: Michael Ilitch Jr., Dale Armin Johnson, Nail Kurian, Michael Luisi, D. Scott Lumpkin, Julie B. Many, Glenn Murray, Peter Schlessel Director of photography: Michael Fimognari Production designer: Russell Barnes Costume designer: Lynn Falconer Music: The Newton Brothers

Rated R, 103 minutes

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Oculus Review

Through the looking glass..

Oculus is a pleasingly creepy low-budget horror flick that plays with some interesting ideas, offers a fresh and unique structure, and understands that some questions are best left unanswered. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Roth Cornet is an Entertainment Editor for IGN. You can chat with her on Twitter: @RothCornet , or follow Roth-IGN  on IGN.

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Oculus Review

Oculus delivers traditional chills, fine performances and a genuinely scary horror experience.

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Oculus is the kind of horror movie that hits my genre sweet spot, and as a result may be the best of its kind I’ve seen in some time. Too many modern horror movies these days, it seems, fall into two categories: they either utilize the now-exhausted found footage format to tell their story, or the story itself is based on real-life terrors like home invasion or pure shock tactics like the Saw series. Oculus uses traditional filmmaking techniques to tell a story that is firmly rooted in the supernatural, but like the best supernatural horror, it also employs a psychological aspect that keeps both the characters and the viewers off-balance.

Oculus also gives you characters to care about – another rarity in too much modern genre fare. The story is told in two timelines, past and present, and director Mike Flanagan (who also co-wrote the screenplay) is able to confidently and easily show us how a childhood tragedy has permanently damaged the two siblings – Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and Tim (Brenton Thwaites) — at the center of the story and make them instantly sympathetic. While their actions as adults are questionable, they are clearly driven by the characters themselves and not based solely on the needs of the plot, which usually results in the protagonists acting or seeming stupid.

As the story unfolds, Kaylie is picking up Tim from the institution to which he’s been committed for 10 years following the violent deaths of their parents (played in flashbacks by Katee Sackhoff and Rory Cochrane). Kaylie brings Tim back to their old house, where we discover that she is convinced – after all this time – that an antique mirror known as the Lasser Glass is responsible for their parents’ demise. The Glass, it seems, is home to an evil, nameless entity that has been destroying lives and families for years. Tim, however, isn’t buying it – at least initially – using all the tools he’s learned in therapy to battle back against his sister’s bizarre assertions.

further reading: The Best Modern Horror Movies

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Kaylie, unfortunately, has used her job as an auction buyer to bring the Glass back into their possession, a decade after it first came into their lives and, in her view, ruined them. She has rigged the room in which the Glass resides with cameras and monitoring devices to capture the mirror in action and prove what it is capable of – while also setting a booby trap to destroy it if things go south. But the mirror has other plans, and soon Kaylie and Tim are caught in the grip of a malevolent power that they may be unable to contain or defeat.

Flanagan knows that the best horror is based not on jump scares (although he deploys those sparingly and effectively) but atmosphere, dread and the unseen. He’s helped by his tremendously game and strong cast. Cochrane and Sackhoff chillingly demonstrate how the mirror corrupts them in the flashback sequences. Doctor Who veteran Gillan is superb as the tightly wound and obsessive Kaylie and Thwaites brings intelligence and a dawning terror to Tim when he realizes that all his treatment has been essentially for nothing (the children who play the younger versions of Kaylie and Tim, Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan, are excellent).

Flanagan’s real expertise comes in the film’s second half, as he almost seamlessly flips back and forth between the past and the present in a cascade of brilliantly staged sequences (the director also edited the film himself). The adult Kaylie may walk through a door and the younger one enters the room; as the shifts between past and present increase in speed and frequency, the results are truly disorienting. Both the characters and the viewers are unsure of where they are in time and space, a feat often achieved in literary horror but rarely captured so well on the screen.

There are echoes of films like The Shining and The Innocents here, but the dynamics of the plot are still fresh enough to keep Oculus from being outright derivative. Most refreshing of all is Flanagan’s refusal to explain what the mirror is, or what exactly it houses: the Lasser Glass just exists, and the lack of an origin story or detailed exposition of whatever resides inside it makes it that much more enigmatic and terrifying (yes, a haunted mirror can be both, amazingly enough). Too many horror films over-explain themselves these days, usually in service of laying the groundwork for a sequel or franchise (I’m looking at you, Sinister and Insidious ), and while I fervently hope that Oculus is successful, I also do not look forward to further films giving us the Lasser Glass’s origins in any more depth than we have now.

Great horror is about the past encroaching on the present, often with tragic results. It is safe to say that things don’t go well for Kaylie and Tim, who are both ultimately unable to shake off the horrific history of their family. But things have gone very well here for Flanagan, whose previous films were all little-seen, micro-budget indies. With Oculus , he has crafted a well-written, excellently-acted, moodily shot and expertly edited film that crackles with intensity and chills, doesn’t waste a minute of screen time and feels like a satisfyingly unsettling and frightening experience. It’s the finest horror movie I’ve seen in a few years, and I hope there’s more to come.

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Don Kaye is an entertainment journalist by trade and geek by natural design. Born in New York City, currently ensconced in Los Angeles, his earliest childhood memory is…

Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – Oculus (2013)

June 12, 2014 by Luke Owen

Oculus , 2014

Directed by Mike Flanagan Starring Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff, Rory Cochrane, Analise Basso and Garrett Ryan

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

Over the last decade or so, the horror genre hasn’t really turned out many “classics”. Despite a great showing of movies at FrightFest and Grimm Up North every year, it always seems to be the gutter-trash “jump scare” horrors that make it in front of general audiences. Oculus certainly isn’t a game-changer, nor is it a “classic”, but it’s easily one of the best horror movies you’ll see this year.

Based on Flanagan’s own short Oculus: Chapter 3 – The Man with a Plan , Oculus plays as a sequel to a film we never saw as a brother and sister duo, Tim and Kaylie, return to their family home to tackle a strange occurrence that happened during their childhood. After their father purchased a beautifully designed mirror, he started to show signs of losing his mind and he eventually killed his wife and was shot dead by Tim. Now that Kaylie has tracked down the mirror, she intends to prove her father innocent and show that the mirror is pure evil.

What’s great about Oculus is that it doesn’t give us the full back story straight off and instead drip feeds you information as the film progresses, which means you are essentially watching two films that cut between each other. This works especially well as the film makes its way towards the third act as the mirror plays tricks on Kaylie and Tim (as well as the audience) and we see both films play at the same time. It’s a hard one to explain, but it’s a superb experience.

Karen Gillan (who is set to kick arse in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy ) is fantastic as the determined Kaylie. Her brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites) may be viewed as the “crazy” one of the duo as he was incarcerate following their father’s death, but it’s Kaylie who really shows signs of losing her mind in the early goings. She has become obsessed with this mirror and in a wonderful piece of exposition, she explains to a series of cameras she has set up just where the mirror came from and what it’s done in the past. It’s a clever way of setting up the mirror’s evil while strengthening and furthering Kaylie’s character. Thwaites also does a great job as the recovering Tim and he draws genuine sympathy from the audience as he tries to move on from his previous life while trying to help his sister get past hers. Credit should also be given to Analise Basso and Garrett Ryan who play the younger versions of Gillan and Thwaites. The pair have a big job on their hands but, for young actors, they really show conviction in their characters and you can feel that they are younger versions of their older counterparts.

It’s also refreshing to see a horror movie that doesn’t rely on the now standard “jump scare” tactic to frighten its audience. Instead, Oculus aims to unnerve those watching it with creepy visuals, suggestion and drawn out moments of tension. There are great directorial and writing flourishes as Flanagan pulls some beautiful ‘bait-and-switch’ moments as if the mirror is influencing the audience as well as the characters. Flanagan doesn’t play his hand too soon and he creates a fantastic atmosphere that will have you itching around your seat while gripping the arm chairs. It’s not exactly In Fear , but it can certainly make you uncomfortable.

Oculus is a film that shows that genuinely good horror does exist and it deserves to be seen by all. It takes its time, it draws you in and – while the finale is a bit lame – it does a great job in unnerving its audience. Gillan and Thwaites are fantastic and the way Flanagan blurs the lines between past and present via the evil of the mirror is a touch of genius. Oculus may not be seen as a “classic”, but it’s brilliant movie.

Flickering Myth Rating  – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.

You can watch a video of Luke Owen meeting the mirror from Oculus here .

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Oculus (2013) : Movie Plot Ending Explained

Mike Flanagan’s direction Oculus, is a horror flick which has a non-linear narrative (his other popular films are Gerald’s Game  and Doctor Sleep ). The Oculus movie cast includes Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff, Rory Cochrane, Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan in the lead roles. I got quite a few requests for this film, finally got watching it, so let’s get going. This is not an Oculus movie review, this is the plot and ending of Oculus Explained, so spoilers ahead!

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Where To Watch?

To find where to stream any movie or series based on your country, use This Is Barry’s Where To Watch .

Oh, and if this article doesn’t answer all of your questions, drop me a comment or an FB chat message, and I’ll get you the answer .  You can find other film explanations using the search option on top of the site.

The strength of the film is the fantastic non-linear storytelling. However, it’s just a lot easier if we walked through the plot in a chronological order. I’d like to mention here that there are two ways to view this film – either as a horror (a paranormal mirror) or a psychological thriller (a crazy family) . Let’s do the paranormal approach first.

Oculus Explained: The Paranormal Version

It began 11 years ago.

A family moves into a new house. Alan, the dad. Marie, the mom. Kaylie, the elder daughter. Tim, the younger son. They buy new furniture. Amongst them is this one mirror. This mirror is evil. And as evil objects, this mirror takes a while before it extends its field of control and domination. The mirror uses illusions to trap its victims.

Dogs and Plants

Through the happenings of this film, we find out that the mirror feeds on dogs, plants, and human minds for its energy. The family dog begins to fall sick. One day, Marie locks the dog up in the office and when Alan gets back in the evening, the dog is gone. Presumably, the mirror consumed it.

Woman in the Office

Marisol, the evil in the mirror seduces Alan. This mind is slowly corrupted by the the mirror as it is in the office room where he is most of the times. Both Kaylie and Tim happen to see this woman in the office room on multiple occasions. Now, they both assume that it is a human woman. Marie has never seen her, although, she does hear Alan talking to someone when in his office room. Marie begins to suspect that Alan is having an affair. Alan begins to grow more distant. He is spoken to by Marisol quite often now and his mind is well possessed.

One day, Marie sees that Alan has bought a gun, apparently for protection. She asks him to lock it away, he agrees. As Marie leaves the room the mirror calls her a “Grotesque cow” in Alan’s voice. Marie is wounded deeply by this. She looks into the mirror and is presented with a distorted image of herself.

Marie Gets Possessed

After hearing from both her children about the “woman in the office”, Marie goes to the office to see a sheet filled with “Marisol”. Not knowing that is evil in the mirror, she concludes that Alan is having an affair. In her anger, she throws something in the direction of the mirror and she hits only the wall next to it. Right after this, Marie is possessed. Tim and Kaylie come to check on her, she chokes Tim. The two kids break away and run upstairs and lock themselves in their room. Just then Alan shows up. He quickly subdues Marie and knocks her out. For a short moment, Alan is in his senses and tries to call for help. But the mirror intercepts and tells Alan to chain and lock up Marie like an animal instead. Alan tells the kids that their mother is sick and they need to keep away from her. He ends up saying “we” instead of “I”, Kaylie notices but Alan doesn’t care to clarify who “we” is. Later, we are shown Alan taking some really bad looking food for Marie. He’s torturing her and making her eat plates. Marie loses her teeth as a result.

Kaylie Calls For Help

Alan has not been paying any bills or buying groceries. The TV goes out, and there is no more food. Kaylie tries telling Alan to get groceries and get their mom a doctor. He doesn’t seem to care. Kaylie decides to talk to her mother only to realize that she’s now a wild creature chained to the wall. Alan gets furious with the kids and grounds them. The kids try calling various doctors but constantly get the same voice asking them to tell their father to make the call. The two realize that there is something extremely strange going on. Kaylie tries to get a neighbour for help, but Alan talks to him like it’s nothing at all. Kaylie tells Tim that it’s time to get really brave. She means that busting their way out might be the only option.

Death Of Marie

The house finally loses power. Tim tries to get his dad to fix it and is greeted by Marisol. Tim freaks out and runs upstairs. At a later time, Tim peeks into the room to see that his dad looks into the mirror and then takes the gun out and loaded it. The kids decide that the mirror is the root of all evil and they need to smash it. But they are faced by Marisol and they run back up to their rooms. Alan goes up to Marie’s room and releases her. She goes banging on the kids’ door. Kaylie instructs Tim to run for the stairs and she goes out and clobbers Marie with a golf club. Tim runs down and Kaylie jumps on to the outside lawn from the window. Inside, Alan goes after Tim and fires a shot. Kaylie hears this and goes in, she finds Alan hiding and he’s signaling to get out. Marie attacks Kaylie and begins to choke her. For a small moment, Marie is back to her senses but Alan shoots and kills her. The kids run and try to smash the mirror but are hitting the wall instead. They realize that the mirror won’t allow them.

Death Of Alan

Alan enters the room and points the gun at Kaylie. He beings to say what the mirror tells him. Tim hits the gun out of Alan’s hands. Alan tries to choke Kaylie, Tim gets the gun and holds it to Alan. He stops choking Kaylie, turns around and get on his knees, puts his hands on the trigger. Alan is back to his senses (just like Marie) for a short bit and he asks Alan to run and pulls the trigger.

Case Concluded

The cops show up and declare that this was a case of a domestic violence where a husband has brutally killed a wife and his son retaliated by killing him. Tim is put into a psychiatric institution and Kaylie is taken to a foster home. Kaylie screams to Tim asking him to remember to keep the promise of killing the mirror. As he’s driven away, at the window, he sees both his dead parents staring at him.

After 11 Years, The Present Day

11 years go by. Tim completes his treatment. The movie begins with a dream sequence where young Tim and Kaylie are at gunpoint and the shooter is Tim. We aren’t shown what the treatment has been like but this seems to be a defining moment to release Tim from his custody. Tim believes, or wants to believe, that what he saw as a kid was merely his young brain creating an elaborate ghost story to cope with the events of his parents’ murders. Kaylie is left all alone in the foster home. She grows old there and their house is now transferred to her. She lives with her fiancee in a different house. In the time that has passed, she has been researching on the mirror to find out that weird and ghastly things have happened to the owners of this mirror. She locates the mirror via the auction company she works in and gets it taken to the old house. There is a short moment where the mirror plays tricks with Kaylie at the auction house (with the blanket-clad disappearing ghoul, the mirror clearly likes to mess around). When Tim comes out Kaylee receives him. She reminds him of their promise to kill the mirror.

Kaylee’s Preparation

In the night Kaylie has a nightmare of her father choking her, she wakes up screaming. Next day, she has Tim come over to the old house where the mirror is back, and Kaylie has set up cameras, screens, plants, food, water and a trip mechanism connected to a 20-pound Danforth anchor. Kaylie thinks she needs to ensure that in case they die, the trip mechanism will cause the mirror to be shattered. She has also asked her fiancee to call on the hour to check on her. If he doesn’t get a response he is to call the police. She begins recording and goes through a list of people who have owned the mirror and their fates. Tim doesn’t believe her because he truly feels that their experiences were just imagination. They argue about their dog and how it perished. Tim says that their dad was a homicidal maniac and killed their mother and that he was having an affair. Kaylie disagrees because their mother had lost her mind when she died. Tim releases Kaylie’s sacrificial dog.

It Begins … Again

For the remainder of the film, the mirror essentially toys around with the two of their minds, makes them run around like children and annihilates them . Kaylie first sees that the cameras have gotten into a position facing each other. When they play the recorded footage, they see that the two of them move the cameras but can’t remember doing it. This would have been an ideal time to bail on the plan and run out, but they don’t. They can’t. They don’t know it yet, but they are already screwed. Tim leaves the house to make a call but can’t get a network. He is suddenly back in the house. He only imagines exiting. They go back in to arrange the cameras. Tim is seeing an image on the screen completely different from what’s going on. This scene is enough to say that, you can’t believe the electronics if your mind is being played around with. Kaylie gets a call from her fiancee checking on her, looks like there is no way to know it’s him. The plants begin to rot as well.

An Apple A Day

Slowly the lights start going out. Tim starts seeing flashes of the past. As Kaylie is fixing bulbs, she picks up an apple and bites into it, only to think she’s bitten into a bulb and is bleeding. Soon she snaps back and sees that it’s indeed the apple. Both their minds are beginning to wander.

Memories Of The Past

Both of them begin to start seeing the past play out in front of them. The event of their mom becoming crazy, the doctor calls, etc. Tim finds himself upstairs and Kaylie is standing in front of the mirror, daydreaming. Just before the timer trips she snaps back and resets it. She begins getting frustrated and breaks a vase with a dead plant in it. Tim sees his younger self who goes down to ask his dad to fix the electricity issue and sees Marisol. The house loses electricity and Kaylie begins to turn on the battery operated lamps. Upstairs, she sees a chain and broken plates and tells herself that it’s not real. As she gets back down, she sees more pieces of a broken plate. When she looks through her phone, the floor is clear. Suddenly dead Marie appears and Kaylie stabs her with a piece of the plate she’s holding. Soon she sees that it’s her fiancee she has stabbed. The piece in her hand is not from a plate but from the vase. Now there is a 50-50 chance that the fiancee is actually in the house and dead. It could be that he’s tried reaching Kaylie, didn’t get through and shows up at the house. But it might be good to assume that all that is happening in the house are mirages. The mirror is projecting visions in their minds to get them to do things.

The 911 Call

The two of them run out and Tim calls 911. A point to note here is that this call goes through (the cops show up, in the end, saying Tim made the call). The mirror has already planned their fates, it’s just executing it . Tim now says that they just have to wait till the trip goes off and the mirror is shattered. It’s not that simple. The lights come back on and they see their doppelgangers inside the room standing in front of the mirror. The two are confused now if what they’re “seeing” from the outside is an illusion or them “being” outside is the illusion. Tim places another call to 911. He hears the old voice asking their father to call the doctor. Kaylie stomps on the phone. The two are convinced that a call never went through and go back into the house. They see their doubles at the mirror with Marisol walking up to them talking in their dad’s voice.

Reliving The Nightmare

Kaylie sees that Tim is now a kid again and running up in fear. She remembers running up with him in the past for similar events. They are back up in the room and haunted by their ghastly mom. Tim realizes that this is just a replay of older events. He goes out and sees his dad with a gun and fires at him. Kaylie, like in the past, is now outside and runs indoors when she hears the gun. She sees her dead fiancee by the mirror. She sees Tim hiding as before and she goes through the events of her mom choking her and dad shooting her mother all over again. Tim sees the events of him finally shooting his dad. He imagines being haunted by ghouls, this is not a memory, this is an illusion currently being projected to instill enough fear in him. Tim wakes up sitting alone by the mirror in the present day, scared.

Oculus Movie Ending Explained. Mirror Wins. Flawless Victory. Fatality!

Tim thinks he is alone in the room. He can’t see Kaylie. She is in the room too. The illusion being projected in her head is that of her younger-self looking into the mirror to see her mom who’s calling out. Young Kaylie goes to the mirror and hugs her mom. In reality, the present day Kaylie is standing in front of the mirror, hugging it. Tim is not seeing this. In his fear, he sees an opportunity to destroy the mirror. He runs to the timer and turns it to zero. The anchor drops and gets Kaylie at the back of her neck. She dies. Tim sees Kaylie only after the anchor hits her.

All Is Lost

The cops arrive and see the footage. Tim recollects all the events as they happened 11 years back. It’s happening again. This time Kaylie is dead. They shouldn’t have messed with that mirror. Tim is arrested as the cops only see Tim killing Kaylie in the recordings. As Tim is driven away, he remembers his promise to his sister which he’s not been able to keep. At the window, this time, he sees his dead parents and now Kaylie too staring at him as the film comes to an end.

Oculus Plot Explanation: Psychological Thriller

Remember we talked earlier about two approaches to this film. This one is seeing all of the events as simply illusions of a deranged family. It will be short and not a lot of fun, which is why it’s at the end of the article. Consider this, the mirror is not evil. Alan is a crazy person. He locks up and tortures Marie who, as a result, loses her mind. Alan eventually shoots and kills Marie. The kids are young and create an elaborate ghost story to deal with this. In this version, their dog just falls sick and dies during one of the trips to the veterinarian (this scene exists in the film too). Years later, the kids too become looney and end up being wrapped up in their own illusions. Tim kills Kaylie because of this. No ghosts, no evil mirror. Just a family with looney genes. The End.

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Barry is a technologist who helps start-ups build successful products. His love for movies and production has led him to write his well-received film explanation and analysis articles to help everyone appreciate the films better. He’s regularly available for a chat conversation on his website and consults on storyboarding from time to time. Click to browse all his film articles

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Oculus, film review: Creaking plot doesn't make Mike Flanagan's horror any less chilling

(15) mike flanagan, 104 mins starring: karen gillan, katee sackhoff, brenton thwaites, article bookmarked.

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Oculus is a slick, cleverly constructed horror film that can't quite escape its contrivances. As in one part of classic British 1945 horror film Dead of Night, the source of all evil here is a mirror.

This handsome antique has caused 45 deaths over four centuries and is now playing havoc with an all-American family, the Russells. The screenplay flits back and forth in time in lithe but confusing fashion.

Eleven years ago, when Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and Tim (Brenton Thwaites) were teenagers, the mirror caused death, destruction and spectacular family breakdown. Now, they are young adults and the only way they can exorcise the past is to look in the haunted glass again.

The director, Mike Flanagan, tries to have it both ways – to make his film both a ghoulish, supernatural shocker and a family psychodrama. The plot creaks but that doesn't make its shock tactics any the less chilling.

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Oculus Reviews

While it may have taken unconventional approaches to the visual language of haunted house movies, the narrative is messy and never offers up anything more than surface-level intrigue.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 20, 2023

We’re left with the terrifying fear that if Tim and Kaylie can lose themselves in the mirror’s reflection, so can we.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Feb 18, 2023

Flanagan's treatment elevates the material, both in his use of mind games and emotional complexity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 12, 2022

It may sound a bit ridiculous, but Flanagan and co-writer Jeff Howard do a fantastic job of making people question whether the threat to our characters is real or imagined right up until the very end of the film.

Full Review | Apr 14, 2021

The horror elements work because this is a character driven story and while there are blood and guts aplenty it is the intensity of the story and the performances that will stay with you.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 1, 2021

Mike Flanagan's debut to mainstream audiences is a tour de force of horror, seamlessly weaving between two timelines as he prepares us for a devastating gut-punch of an ending.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 29, 2020

While there are some solid scares and creepy scenes, considering the pieces, they never amount to much.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Jul 8, 2020

Oculus is an ambitious horror film that doesn't quite reach its potential. While it has a strong cast ... the story just feels like it's spinning its wheels, trying to find the traction it needs to propel forward.

Full Review | Jul 6, 2020

Oculus is a smartly-plotted evil mirror film which slowly reveals itself as a haunting portrayal of child abuse. It's a nice light movie!

Full Review | Jun 30, 2020

The biggest misfortune in Oculus is that it's almost a good movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.7/5 | Nov 22, 2019

The final product is a beautifully shot and wonderful acted entry in the never-ending pool of niche horror movies looking to shock, scare, and unnerve.

Full Review | Original Score: 6.5/10 | Aug 8, 2019

Horror fans shouldn't miss Oculus; films as creepy as this one don't come along too often.

Full Review | Original Score: 7.6/10 | Jun 21, 2019

Mike Flanagan's Oculus does more to a familiar premise than most standard-issue scary movies out there.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 14, 2019

Ultimately, though, it is the characters that count, and Flanagan gives emotional resonance to the story of charming family undone by unexplained forces; and his actors go a long way in portraying this with honesty.

Full Review | Mar 5, 2019

A clever storyline keeps the pace, although it could be argued the film had too many storylines going for its running time.

Full Review | Feb 1, 2019

Oculus was actually awesome, even though I didn't have any expectations for it at all...happy to tell you that this one was well thought-out with some great performances.

Full Review | Jan 5, 2019

In some off-the-wall realm, Oculus works its seedy magic because the concept of frightening furniture and childhood disillusionment is not exactly what one would expect as a passable taunting tie-in of sorts.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 11, 2018

The acting and characters are solid enough, the general idea of the story is captivating and the atmosphere of the piece is genuinely disconcerting.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Nov 1, 2018

The acting is solid, the camera work is noteworthy, and the story is well written.

Full Review | Oct 26, 2018

I thought that the storyline was original, awesome and definitely refreshing.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 15, 2018

Never Think Impossible

Reviews, rants and the pursuit of geek zen written by a. leon. updated weekly..

Horror , Movie Review

Movie Review: Oculus (2013)

(Credit: Intrepid Pictures)

Spoilers like to stare into mirrors and reflect.

Whenever I feel myself stuck in a rut with bad movies, I find it refreshing to go back a few years. I have a stack of movies that I’ve mentally put off for a slow week. This is one is not even that old, but it does show up now and then. It never dawned on me that it is an early Mike Flanagan film until I saw the credits. It also becomes rather obvious later as he goes into his now token timeline switch. It’s less prevalent at the start, but eventually it takes over the premise.

Oculus (2013) was directed by Mike Flanagan, who wrote it with Jeff Howard and Jeff Seidman. Kaylee Russell (Karen Gillian) is finally reunited with her brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites) after he’s spent years locked away for murder when they were both younger. Kaylee has been planning to prove the events that led to their parents’ death were due to a supernatural entity that resides in an old mirror. For that reason, she has obtained the antique and set up cameras to record any activity.

The storytelling technique will soon take over as we see into the past at their young selves as they grow up with their parents Marie (Katee Sackhoff) and Alan (Rory Cochrane). Alan will slowly isolate himself in his study, where the mirror seems to entice him to alienate his family. Marie will become increasingly paranoid (technically she’s got every right to be) and unhinged. The timeline then starts to jump back and forth as Kaylee’s and Tim’s memories seem to interact with their modern selves.

It’s not bad, but I couldn’t help the wasted potential of the mirror itself as an element of horror. There are so many cool illusions that I expected but the focus is basically on anything else. Unfortunately this now is sort of pushing me into starting a trend for evil mirrors in cinema. However, this is still a pretty solid horror vehicle, although the ending is sort of anticlimactic. It’s both expected and extensively warned upon than the reality is distorted and yet we still fall in the same trap.

Lightly recommended with reservations. If you’re a Flanagan fan, you can probably get a lot more mileage out of it. Otherwise, it’s still a scary vehicle which plays with the family dynamic and breaks the usual sacred infallible wisdom of parenthood. Worth a watch for a slow day, but don’t expect too much out of the mirror as a terror plot device.

That will do for now.

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Oculus (2013)

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Movie Review: Oculus (2013)

• Dan Franzen
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• 5 responses
• --> April 10, 2014

A loving mother.

Oculus is a sloppy horror movie about a possessed mirror and the vengeance that a grown woman, whose family was destroyed by the mirror when she was a girl, attempts to wreak upon it. There are a couple of shock moments — not shocking, just shock — but for the most part the plot dreamed up by Jeff Howard and Mike Flanagan (who also directed) is weak, overly murky, and aimless.

It’s also much more of a comedy than a horror movie, if the screening audience was any indication. Boy, you never heard such laughter. True, there are some gasps from time to time, but truth be told, those scenes were predicated on the audience’s not knowing that something might happen when a camera pans slowly around a room or focuses tightly on our heroine’s face.

For the story, it seems that 11 years ago something dreadful happened to the Russell family. Our first encounter is with the grown Tim (Brenton Thwaites), who’s being released from a mental hospital. Tim, we learn, was blamed for whatever happened so long ago and has been institutionalized ever since. He’s met outside the hospital by his older sister, Kaylie (Karen Gillan). Kaylie wants to help her brother adjust to life on the outside, but first she has a favor to ask, and it involves helping her (or them) overcome their demons once and for all.

The movie jumps back and forth in time, sometimes a little too seamlessly. As things unfold, we’re able to piece together what happened — or at least how Kaylie and Tim remember how things happened. It all has to do with an old, old mirror that their father had purchased for their new home. In the present, Kaylie has gone to the trouble of finding a buyer for it at auction and then offers to fix a crack in the mirror (this makes sense in the movie). Instead, she hauls it to the old family house, where she plans to prove — to herself, to the world — that the mirror is evil and that it’s to blame for the deaths of Tim and Kaylie’s parents.

Kaylie appears unhinged right from the start. Instead of helping Tim to adjust, she focuses all her energy on the mirror instead. She sets up an elaborate system involving the use of multiple cameras, the presentation of historical evidence of the mirror’s effect on (some of) its previous owners, the monitoring of the temperature in the house, the health of the plants in the house, and so on. She also employs several egg timers to indicate when she needs to hydrate and eat, when she needs to change the videotapes, and when she needs to reset the kill switch. The kill switch here is a large descending weight that launches a swinging blade directly at the mirror. Kaylie has put some thought into this, is what I’m getting at.

Not looking at the mirror.

But the movie spends far too much time with this and trying to persuade the audience that Kaylie’s right, rather than just presenting her evidence and then moving on. Hell, it’s practically a third over by the time anything remotely scary starts to happen. And because there’s so much flitting between time frames (often in the same scene), perception itself becomes more and more muddled, making it tough to discern if what appears to be happening to the characters is actually happening. There were far too many times when I just wasn’t sure if the whole mess was all in Kaylie’s head, and that kind of uncertainty made Oculus hard to enjoy on that or any level.

It would have also been better served if the glacial pace at the beginning moved quickly into creative, fast-paced horror action; instead, there was a lot of talking (mostly between Kaylie and a disbelieving Tim) punctuated by intermittent pieces of propelled plot. On the more positive note, both Gillan and Thwaites are good, as is Rory Cochrane as their father, Alan.

The denouement, however, kind of fizzles. It’s the kind that’s supposed to come out of nowhere and startle you something fierce, but all I felt was sweet relief that the end was nigh. The ending just feels like a cheat, or maybe something akin to a cheap toupee slapped over a shaved weasel with digestive problems. And although that may not be a particularly coherent analogy, it still seems quite appropriate for Oculus .

Tagged: ghost , mirror , murder

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'Movie Review: Oculus (2013)' have 5 comments

April 10, 2014 @ 6:48 pm IntegrityResources

Sorry to hear that. It looked to have all the needed elements to make a good horror flick.

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April 10, 2014 @ 7:23 pm Vulcan

Part of the enjoyment for me was trying to ascertain what was real and what was an illusion. It was an effective way to keep me guessing what was going to happen next.

April 10, 2014 @ 9:18 pm CGDelco

I haven’t seen a decent horror movie in years.

April 11, 2014 @ 4:13 pm Kegstand

I found it suspenseful throughout but would have liked a more pronounced ending.

April 13, 2014 @ 6:16 pm LisaPas

Such a convoluted mess — it’s been a while since I’ve seen a horror movie with ZERO explanation of what’s going on. Absolutely nothing has any weight here. Too bad.

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Oculus: the lasser glass' strange origin explained.

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Looped review: an overly simple love story lacking gameplay, suits' best episode arc was 9 seasons in the making (& it was worth the wait).

Oculus was a 2013 psychological horror film from Mike Flanagan ( Doctor Sleep ) that made audiences terrified of something as benign as a household mirror with its cursed Lasser Glass.

Flanagan, whose name is slowly becoming synonymous with the horror genre in general, released  Oculus  toward the beginning of his career.  Oculus  was originally intended to be a series of short films, but couldn't get the funding to complete the series and focused his talents elsewhere. His first feature,  Absentia , was funded through a successful Kickstarter campaign and ended up being released direct-to-video before being picked up by Netflix, which helped boost Flanagan right into funding for his next feature, which saw the director returning to his old idea and structuring it as a feature instead of short chapters.  Oculus  was Flanagan's first theatrical release in 2014, but the film traveled through the festival circuit in 2013 before being distributed to a wider audience.

Related: The True Story That Inspired Netflix's Dead Kids

Starring Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff , and Rory Cochrane,  Oculus  is a paranormal time warp centered around two siblings who re-acquire a mirror that one believes is directly responsible for the untimely, violent deaths of their parents when they were children.

The Lasser Glass' Origin Explained

Oculus  explores the dark history surrounding the Lasser glass when Kaylie ( Gillan ) starts to go mad on a quest to prove the mirror's supernatural influence. Her brother, Tim (Thwaites), is convinced that the mirror is merely what Kaylie has chosen to blame, as he's been treated throughout the years by various psychologists who have all convinced him there was nothing supernatural involved.

In her research, Kaylie learned that events just like what she remembered date all the way back to 1754 and involved the mirror in a significant fashion. In 1754, the mirror belonged to Phillip and Virginia Lasser, who displayed the mirror prominently in their home. Phillip was found burnt to death at the base of their fireplace. Robert Clancy, who was a large man of around 300 pounds, obtained the mirror in 1864 and hung it in the ballroom of his Atlanta home. Soon after, he lost a dangerous amount of weight for an unknown reason and died. In 1904, Mary O'Connor from New England put the mirror in her personal bathroom and was found in her bathtub only two weeks later, dead from dehydration despite the bathtub being full of water. Alice Carden of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, hung the mirror in the children's nursery in 1943. Carden ended up drowning both of her children, then smashed her own bones with a hammer inside the nursery. Her dogs also vanished from the home.

In 1955, Tobin Capp hung the bedroom in his mirror and was found starved to death in the same room with the mirror. His pet Dalmatian vanished and all his house plants were also dead. The mirror was hung in the lobby of Hill Trust Bank in San Diego, California in 1965. Maria Wicker, one of the bank's tellers, locked her manager in the vault and chewed through a live power line. All the plants inside the bank died as well. In 1971, Oliver Jeffries, a New York City teacher, obtained the mirror and hung it in a central lecture hall. Like in other cases, his classroom plants all died, but he tried to destroy the mirror, then walked out of his classroom and into oncoming traffic. Marisol Chavez died from  a hemorrhage related to a miscarriage and perished in the same room as the mirror in 1975. Chavez also pulled out her teeth with pliers and kept them in a plastic bag. In 2002, Alan and Marie Russell experienced the same dead plants and the disappearance of their family's dog after Alan hung the mirror in his home office. Within two weeks, Marie suffered a nervous breakdown and ends up shot dead by her husband. Alan tried to kill his son, Tim, and daughter, Kaylie, but was shot dead by Tim in self-defense. The story of the Russell family is the central plot of the movie,  Oculus .

Next: The Evil Dead: The Necronomicon Ex-Mortis' Powers Explained

• oculus (2014)

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Oculus Discussion *Major Spoilers in Description*

Wonder what everyone thought about this one, as i've had some time to think about it now...

So, the one question I have heard over and over again... is why doesn't she just destroy the mirror?

The movie suggests an answer in the fact that it will protect itself at all costs. The most obvious examples of this are when the kids can't hit the mirror and Tim puts the chair down before smashing the thing to pieces. Both of these examples, however, point to a thought even more sinister... the mirror seems to have the ability to manipulate thoughts and basically take away a person's free will. Of course at this point, we have the "unreliable narrator" question come into play, but it makes you wonder whether Kaylie & Tim's promise to destroy the mirror was not even Kaylie's own thought, but something implanted by the mirror in order to ensure there were "no loose ties."

I also wonder why the mirror seems to "release" people just before they're killed. These moments always occur just as a family member seems to have a moment of endearment (Kaylie's embrace with her mother, the dad telling his son to run before pulling the trigger, the mother saying Kaylie's name in a loving way before being shot). Is this a measure of trying to make the victim have a pleasant last moment, or perhaps trying to give them one last gasp of hope before killing them?

Either way, I was happy that this movie did not rely on jump scares and thoroughly enjoyed it the whole way through.

Things That Movies And TV Predicted For 2024

For about as long as humans have been telling stories, they have been using those stories to describe what the future might be like. The sci-fi genre is where predictive fiction really took off, and it is still where future-looking stories happen most often, but it's far from the only type of fiction that looks ahead. Almost any category of movie or television series has examples of creators sharing what they think our future holds to varying degrees of fantasticality, and it's always interesting when we actually reach the year that past stories have looked ahead at.

We previously looked at movies that predicted what 2023 would look like , and now we're doing the same for 2024. In addition, the exercise has been expanded to also look at a few television shows that were set in a then-future 2024. As you'd expect, most of these got next to nothing right about our current year, particularly projects that relied on magical or supernatural elements for their storytelling. However, some of the following films and shows actually got shockingly close to the truth with their predictions for 2024.

The Thirteenth Floor

A lot of sci-fi, particularly in the hidden gem-laden '80s and '90s, heavily features virtual reality and imagines its eventual ubiquity in society. While VR did finally see mass market penetration as an entertainment medium in the mid-2010s with the release of products like the Oculus Quest, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR, we're still nowhere near it completely taking over every facet of our lives. Its technology certainly isn't advanced enough yet to fool people into thinking they are living a life they aren't actually living.

That was the basic idea behind the 1999 sci-fi noir "The Thirteenth Floor," based on the 1973 German miniseries "World on a Wire" (which itself was an adaption of a 1964 novel called "Simulacron-3"). The bulk of the movie is set in present day 1999, with people unknowingly inhabiting a virtual reality construct of 1937 Los Angeles. At least, that's what the movie wants the audience to believe.

In a major twist, it's revealed that 1999 Los Angeles is also a simulation, with the whole thing actually taking place in 2024 and the main character having died decades earlier. It's just his consciousness that's alive in the 2024 VR program of 1999 Los Angeles of 1937 Los Angeles. Got all that? Needless to say, VR technology isn't anywhere close to being advanced enough to perpetuate that many layers of false realities — and here's hoping it never is.

Beyond the Time Barrier

The oldest movie in this feature by a considerable margin, "Beyond the Time Barrier" is a 1960 B-movie about a military test pilot who crashes an experimental spacecraft and somehow wakes up in the year 2024. When the film was made, 2024 was over six decades away, so you can imagine how futuristic the film imagined everything to be at this point in humanity's timeline. However, unlike some of the more hopeful sci-fi of the era, "Beyond the Time Barrier" presented an extremely bleak vision of what was in store for Earth in the 21st century.

Initially, all Major Bill Allison (Robert Clarke) finds is a desolate wasteland for miles in all directions. However, he eventually discovers an advanced underground facility, which is where the last remaining humans have been forced to live due to the damage of a "cosmic plague" brought upon by a nuclear weapons mishap. It's also been two decades since the last new human was born. And, unlike "Fallout," there isn't even a façade of things being peaceful and idyllic down there — it's a brutal place run by cruel leaders. 

"Beyond the Time Barrier" has largely been, well, lost to time. You certainly won't see it on any lists of the best sci-fi movies ever made , but it's available to watch on multiple streaming services, so feel free to check it out if you're curious about how the less-optimistic sci-fi writers of the 1960s saw 2024.

Highlander II: The Quickening

The "Highlander" franchise had such promise after the original 1986 film, but it was all downhill after "Highlander II: The Quickening." Actually, that's not fair — everything that's come since "Highlander II" has been leagues better, though that isn't saying much. The second film was one of those sequels that was such an embarrassment to the franchise that the next installment, "Highlander III: The Sorcerer," took place directly after the original film and basically pretended "The Quickening" never happened.

So what did happen in the movie that didn't happen? Like so many films of its era, the 1991 release was all about pollution and the destruction of the ozone layer. Things get so bad that, at the end of the decade, a shield has to be built to replace the depleted ozone layer and prevent further deaths resulting from direct contact with the sun's powerful rays. Fast forward to 2024, and that shield has started to fail. 

This then ties back into the main concept of the "Highlander" franchise and its eternal battle between immortals. In this case, it's Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) and Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez (Sean Connery), the only two major returning characters from the previous film. There's no point in saying much else about the ridiculous and convoluted plot of "The Quickening," except that we obviously don't have immortals battling under a failing radiation shield in the real 2024.

The COVID-19 outbreak was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, changing the film industry forever . That same month, screenwriters Adam Mason and Simon Boyes immediately began brainstorming a movie about the pandemic. By July, "Songbird" was already being shot — fittingly becoming the first movie to film in Los Angeles since the pandemic had shut everything down. It was released in December 2020, a remarkable turnaround for a movie about a pandemic that itself wasn't even a year old yet.

But the film wasn't about the present day state of the pandemic. Instead, "Songbird" imagined a 2024 where the pandemic and its associated lockdowns and quarantines were not only still ongoing, but had gotten much worse. By then, COVID-19 had mutated into the much more dangerous COVID-23. Luckily, that didn't happen in real life — but it would've been tough to blame anyone at the time for assuming the worst about how the next few years were going to unfold. 

The plot revolves around the virtual relationship between an immune motorbike courier (KJ Apa) and an artist (Sofia Carson) who is quarantining with her grandmother. As for the actual quality of "Songbird," well, there's a reason most movies spend multiple years in development. While some critics praised it for daring to take on the pandemic while it was still happening and for managing to get a movie from concept to completion in nine months, reviews were overwhelmingly negative — to the tune of a 9% Rotten Tomatoes score . 

The Lazarus Project

Forward-looking sci-fi has been just as prevalent on the small screen over the years, and not only in the United States. The British TV series "The Lazarus Project" debuted in July 2022, and, while it was set in the present day, it went on for long enough that we got a look at what the writers thought 2024 might hold for us. It follows a group of people trying to harness the ability to control time loops — and make changes therein. 

By the show's second season, time has progressed to the then-near future of 2024, and all that time looping had come at a cost. A black hole has formed as a result of people messing around too much with the space-time continuum, and it threatens to unravel all of existence if it's not brought under control. Despite critical acclaim and encouraging viewership numbers, "The Lazarus Project" wasn't renewed for a third season, all the more tragic given that Season 2 ended on a cliffhanger. 

It hasn't been that long since the show ended, so here's hoping someone either picks it up to make a full Season 3 or at least a movie that lets fans see the fate of the characters who were left in danger at the end of Season 2 — even though 2024 will be in the past by the time it realistically happens. 

The Last Days of American Crime

A concept that sci-fi writers love to explore is a vision of the future where it has been made nearly impossible to commit crimes — and all the ways that this seemingly fool-proof idea inevitably backfires. Perhaps the most famous example is "Minority Report," first a Philip K. Dick novella, and later, a Steven Spielberg film. One of the most recent takes on the concept is the 2020 Netflix film "The Last Days of American Crime," which imagines a 2024 where the U.S. government has developed an electronic signal that will make it so people literally can't break the law.

The first of many mistakes made in this movie by people who should've known better is that it is officially announced a week in advance that the crime-blocking signal is going to be activated. So, naturally, a group of thieves decide to spend that week doing the proverbial one last heist before it presumably becomes impossible for them to do any more thieving. Naturally, things go wrong — the signal ends up not being all it was promised to be.

It's a decent enough premise, but "The Last Days of American Crime" doesn't come anywhere close to living up to it. Watch "Minority Report" instead — and if you've already seen it, just watch it again instead of this clunker. It's so bad that it has a 0% rating on  Rotten Tomatoes .

A Boy and His Dog

Writer Harlan Ellison did a lot of pioneering stuff in the area of forward-looking fiction, and his material has been adapted into just about every medium there is. Sometimes, even a single Ellison story would cross multiple mediums — like his 1969 short story "A Boy and His Dog," which would eventually become a novella, a graphic novel, and a live-action movie. The film stars Don Johnson as Vic, an 18-year-old boy with no understanding of morality who scavenges in a post-apocalyptic United States with the help of his telepathic dog Blood.

Released in 1975, the movie focuses primarily on 2024 as its setting, "a future you'll probably live to see," said the tagline. Positioning itself as a dark comedy, some of the film's content has proven to be highly contentious over the years, but it remains a cult favorite to this day. "It is a movie that reflects its times, and yet speaks to current intelligence," Ellison told The Dissolve when "A Boy and His Dog" was released on Blu-ray.

Writer/director L.Q. Jones claims that the movie inspired George Miller in creating the "Mad Max" films, the first of which debuted just four years later, and people who worked on the "Fallout" games have cited it as an influence. "'A Boy and His Dog' inspired 'Fallout' on many levels, from underground communities of survivors to glowing mutants," designer and scripter Jesse Heinig told The Escapist .

The Undeclared War

"The Undeclared War" is another British TV program that took viewers to the year 2024 at a time when 2024 wasn't that far away. Released on the streaming service Peacock in the United States, the miniseries ran in Summer 2022 and looked ahead to the 2024 British election season. More specifically, it focuses on a series of cyber attacks launched with the goal of disrupting democracy. 

Though the exact events of "The Undeclared War" haven't actually come to pass, cyber attacks launched with the purpose of interfering with elections are indeed a modern reality. The conflict of the show is so believable, in fact, that when it marketed itself in the U.K. with radio warnings about an impending cyber attack meant to sound like real broadcasts, people believed it, freaked out, and subsequently complained when they found out they'd been duped.

It's a type of stunt marketing that actually has roots in sci-fi: The 1938 radio drama adaptation of the H.G. Wells classic "The War of the Worlds" famously caused panic when it was broadcast as if it was an actual report of a real alien invasion. Just how much worry it actually caused has been debated in recent years (many now believe the levels of panic were exaggerated by newspapers and narrator Orson Welles).

When "Blade Runner" was released in 1982, its 2019 setting was far off into the future, so it can't be blamed for inaccurately predicting that our cities would be bathed in neon at this point. The same can't be said for the British film "Narcopolis," which imagined a similar aesthetic for our current era — not nearly as forgivable for being so far off base given that it was made in 2015.

As for the actual story behind "Narcopolis," it doesn't deal with replicant humans living among us. Instead, it imagines a 2024 where all recreational drugs have been legalized in the U.K. and police forces are sent out to try and stop the drug dealers who are still trying to operate with the necessary licenses. Soon, they discover that an incredibly powerful new mystery drug has been created, and they have to figure out where it's coming from and how to stop it before it gets out of control.

There's actually some good stuff here, but "Narcopolis" suffers from a lull about a third of the way through the story. In his review of the film for the Los Angeles Times , critic Michael Rechtshaffen laments that "Narcopolis" is bookended by a strong start and finish but has a weak middle that indulges too much in writer/director Justin Trefgarne's obvious reverence for "Blade Runner" and "The Terminator." He wrote: "By the time that more thought-provoking conclusion finally arrives, viewer attention will likely have drifted off into another dimension."

Illang: The Wolf Brigade

It's 2024, and political tensions have forced North Korea and South Korea to lay out a five-year process which will see the two nations reunified. This makes the United States, China, Japan, and Russia nervous and leads to them hitting both Korean nations with various sanctions, which have severe repercussions on their economies. The now-struggling Korean people are no longer on board with the reunification plans, and civil unrest has broken out. This forces the South Korean government to create a police force of powerful, exoskeleton-wearing officers to get things back under control.

This is the plot of "Illang: The Wolf Brigade," a 2018 South Korean sci-fi film that ultimately didn't find an audience, nor did it win much favor with critics. It's one of a number of live-action remakes of anime movies — in this case, 1999's "Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade" — that have failed to live up to their predecessors. If the concept interests you, you're best off checking out "Jin-Roh," which was written by Mamoru Oshii and is based on the first chapter of his manga "Kerberos Panzer Cop" (though it's worth pointing out that "Jin-Roh" differs greatly in terms of setting and plot, taking place in Japan during an alternate history where Nazi Germany won World War II). 

Star Trek: The Next Generation

"Star Trek" has always had a lot of fun with the fact that the distant past is actually our present or near-future, the most famous example being "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," in which Captain Kirk and his crew travel back in time to 1986, the year the movie was released. The characters of other "Star Trek" shows and films have also looked back at a time that was the past for them but is still the future for us.

It's always been neat to listen to characters discussing major historical events that still haven't happened for us. In the "Star Trek" world, a lot of stuff went down in 2024, with several major events taking place. In "The High Ground," an episode from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" Season 3, Data speaks of 2024 being the year that Northern Ireland broke away from the United Kingdom and unified with the Republic of Ireland to form a single, autonomous nation. What's interesting is that, due to the impact of Brexit, a united Ireland looks more likely in 2024 than it has for a long time, per Politico .

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

"Star Trek: The Next Generation" isn't the only "Star Trek" show that has discussed major events occurring in 2024. Much of "Star Trek: Picard" Season 2 takes place in an alternate version of 2024, which — at the time of the season's release — was still two years in the future. It predicted that 2024 was the year that Jean-Luc Picard's ancestor, Renée Picard, would make a major breakthrough in the fight against climate change.  "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" did those shows one better by having members of its crew actually travel back in time to 2024, and not an alternate version, either.

In the two-part episode "Past Tense," Commander Sisko, Dr. Bashir, and Jadzia Dax end up in 2024 because of a transporter accident. But it isn't just any random day in 2024 that the "DS9" crew stumble into: It's just before the Bell Riots (named after lead protester Gabriel Bell), a civil clash that occurred in San Francisco that serves as a major event within the history of the "Star Trek" universe. This was one of the darker depictions of humanity shown in any "Star Trek" production up to that point, a franchise that was generally known for having a more upbeat and optimistic tone compared to most of its sci-fi peers.

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Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot

The true story of Donna and Reverend WC Martin and their church in East Texas, in which 22 families adopted 77 children from the local foster system, igniting a movement for vulnerable child... Read all The true story of Donna and Reverend WC Martin and their church in East Texas, in which 22 families adopted 77 children from the local foster system, igniting a movement for vulnerable children everywhere. The true story of Donna and Reverend WC Martin and their church in East Texas, in which 22 families adopted 77 children from the local foster system, igniting a movement for vulnerable children everywhere.

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• Trivia According to executive producer Letitia Wright , the film's message was to make the audience ask itself, "How do we as a community, not only the church, but how do we rally everyone to step in for the kids, because they are our future."
• Connections Featured in Townhall: DailyWire+ and Angel Studios Team Up (2024)

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Watch～ Inside Out 2 2024 (.FulLMovie.) Free Online on English

01 minutes ago — [アニプレックス] While several avenues exist to view the highly praised film Inside Out 2 online streaming.

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The Paul King film has emerged as the theatrical favorite for the holidays, crossing $100 million domestically earlier this week. With a $119 million cume to date, the film continues to show strength and will reach $300 million globally before the calendar turns. Though it slid into second place for Friday with $6.75 million, Crunchyroll. “Inside Out 2” fell 51% from its opening day last week. The latest and final entry in the current continuity of DC Comics adaptations has struggled for air, only reaching $65 million in its first week of release. The first Aquaman,” released in 2018, surpassed that figure in its opening weekend alone. 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‘Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1’ Review: The Beauty, and the Bloodshed

In the first of a projected four-film cycle, Kevin Costner revisits the western genre and U.S. history in a big, busy drama.

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By Manohla Dargis

Midway through Kevin Costner’s big, busy, decentered western “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1,” the actor Danny Huston delivers a brief speech. The year is 1863 — two years into the Civil War — and his character, a colonel in charge of a military fort in the southwest, is discoursing on a nearby settlement called Horizon. Apaches have recently burned the hamlet to the ground, killing scores of settlers. You simply need look at the land, the colonel says, to see why the newcomers will keep coming.

“You may recall that’s what drove us across the ocean to this country in the first place.”

Huston, an imposing presence with a rich, sepulchral voice that can suggest depths, delivers this nod at Manifest Destiny with arid sobriety. His words certainly sound meaningful yet this reference to American expansionism just hangs in the air, untethered from history or ideology. Given this nod as well as the film’s large scale, crowded cast, multiple story lines and nearly three-hour run time, it’s reasonable to assume that Costner will add context, commentary or, really, anything . Yet all that’s clear from “Chapter 1,” the lead-in for his splashily publicized four-film cycle , is that the land was vast and beautiful, and everyone wanted a piece.

“Chapter 1” is the first movie that Costner has directed since his 2003 western “Open Range,” an earnest period drama about free-grazing cattlemen facing down a wealthy rancher. What’s striking about that film, beyond how Costner draws from so many different genre touchstones — John Ford, Clint Eastwood and Sam Peckinpah, among others — is how he tries to honor old-fashioned westerns that he so clearly loves while also complicating the myth of the American West through his character, a violence-haunted gunfighter.

A version of that same man — tough, terse, good with a gun, not bad with the little ladies and now named Hayes Ellison — rides into “Chapter 1” about an hour in, handsomely framed against a bright blue sky. What takes him so long? Given how the movie plays like an extended prologue, I suspect that Costner timed his entrance for a four-part project rather than for a stand-alone film. That makes it tough to get a handle on precisely what he’s up to here, other than gesturing at history, re-engaging with an archetypically American genre and readying the foundation for an epic that will continue when “Chapter 2” opens in August.

Written by Costner and Jon Baird, “Chapter 1” features uneven lines of action that jump across the map, from the southwest to the Territory of Wyoming. In one section, bad men with good cheekbones, their dusters trimmed with animals skins à la Gladiatorial Rome, chase after a righteously violent woman (Jena Malone in a lively, credible turn). In time, they end up in one of those frontier towns with muddy streets and desperate characters, a sinkhole where Hayes rides in with some gold and exits with Marigold (Abbey Lee), a lady of the evening (and afternoon). In another section, Luke Wilson leads a wagon train peopled with tough Americans, Laplander goons and two British twits itching for some punishment.

The story line that revs up the action centers on the settlement, a riverfront hamlet on a ribbon of green that winds through the desert and has attracted the attention of a tribe of White Mountain Apache led by Tuayeseh (Gregory Cruz). Soon after the movie opens, the settlers are swinging their partners to fiddles like good John Ford folk; not long after, many are dead, cut down by Apaches. Among the survivors are the newly widowed, impeccably manicured Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her daughter, Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail), who take refuge in the fort. There, they meet a first lieutenant, Trent Gephart (Sam Worthington), a thoughtful soul who refers to Native Americans as Indigenous.

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