The horror genre has had quite a nice 12 month period in terms of revenue, though in terms of quality it’s been more mixed. The Purge had moments of thrills, but the characters were too stupid to care about, while The Conjuring didn’t quite live up to the hype (though it’s still a decent movie, all things considered). Meanwhile, Oculus goes against that trend by not only flopping at the box office, but similarly flopping in terms of quality, a shame due to all the promise the movie contains.

The movie, about a brother and a sister (Karen Gillan and Brenton Thwaites) dealing with an evil mirror that ruined their childhood, leaves a lot of questions to the audience. Namely; why can’t the two leave the house? Really, if you act this dumb, a killer mirror should be the least of your worries. The lack of common sense doesn’t just stretch to the characters in the film, as the director of this, Mike Flanagan, also lacks the foresight to see the potential in the premise.

There’s a chance to go all-out crazy here, much in the style of some of Joe Dantes features, especially since the crux of the movie is the inherently silly premise of a mirror that manipulates people. Alas, it’s commitment to doing this whole thing with a straight face conflicts with their commitment to that aforementioned silly premise story. Karen Gillan eschews TARDIS’s for mirrors here, not showing much range beyond screaming and delivering repetitive exposition in the most unimaginative way possible. Thwaites fares a little better, but his character arc is only slightly meatier here in terms of depth. But they all pale in comparison to a cute little puppy Gillan uses for an experiment in the film. Frankly, that pooch is the only character I was really caring about in this flick, even in the flashback sequences.

Those flashback scenes start out interesting, since the characters ignorance of the mirrors powers creates some genuine tension, but by the end of it all every good piece of the film has long, long since been forgotten in a frenzy of mind-bending moments that fall almost beautifully flat. So pretty much everything except for cute puppies is going awry in the feature, but let’s not forget about the main component of a horror flick: the scares! Those actually fare a bit better than the rest of the film suggests, the best moment being one involving some figures covered in sheets that disappear and then reappear again. By the end though, they lose their subtlety and just get a bit too blood heavy to fit in with the rest of this pointless movie.