Occullus

I like me some mirror based horror movies, so of course I had to see this one some time.

Kaylie and Tim had a tough childhood. Their father and mother tried to kill them, and the son killed the father. And then Tim ended up in a psychiatric ward for eleven years. But the cause of this all is an evil mirror and now that Tim's out, Kaylie wants them to deal with the mirror. And so we switch back and forth between now and then as events unfold and the family slowly goes crazy. The mirror makes things not as they seem, so what seems crazy might be perfectly fine, but the mirror doesn't want them to succeed...

And the big problem with this movie is "the mirror makes things not as they seem". It's all very well creating horror of ghosts and strange things in the mirror and such, but when the scare is supposed to be "that thing you were eating isn't what you thought you were", this doesn't work when the audience can't trust what's going on. Certainly I wasn't surprised by anything, because I wasn't taking anything I saw at face value, which meant the big shock moments didn't subvert my expectations... indeed, I picked most of the scary moments before they happened, because they were also really obvious.

This features, as notable, one Karen Gillan, with red hair and random accent. We also get Katee Sackhoff, so someone for UK and US nerds to see! Otherwise... there are other people around. The acting is decent, but they are constrained by the needs of the effects.

Not horror. Well, certainly not effective horror.

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