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Health & Fitness

Movie Review - Oculus

Oculus ** (R) This horror flick could either be seen as a mess of temporal hopscotching, or a film-school exercise in trying to relate the stars’ sordid past to their scary, suspenseful present. Karen Gillan and Brenton Thwaites play adult siblings who were involved in their parents’ grisly deaths 11 years earlier. He’s spent the interim in prison; she’s been awaiting his release, and preparing to prove that a demon lurking in an antique mirror in their former home caused all the carnage, rather than her little brother. She plans to document the malevolent spirit’s existence as they try on those ghost-hunting "reality" TV shows, and kill that sucker for good, or banish it back to Hades, or whatever.

Director and co-writer Mike Flanagan careens between their current day and night of confrontation, and flashbacks to the fateful events of yore, sometimes mixing the two. The result may seem more confusing than compelling. One wonders if the evil presence is real, or the delusion of either of its pursuers. The concept is solid. The scripted plan for proving and nailing the entity is cleverly orchestrated. The proceedings are gory enough for genre fans. But the time-mingling format requires more effort to follow than the payoff justifies. (4/11/14)

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