OCULUS

Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites) has spent years in a psychiatric hospital, trying to get over the traumatic impact on his fragile psyche of the deaths of his parents. After being released and reuniting with his sister Kaylie (Karen Gillan), Tim begins to understand that the roots of their misfortune are far more sinister than he could have realized.

Convinced that an old mirror was responsible for their family tragedy, Kaylie has spent the intervening years tracing the mirror's 300 years of mysterious history and the bloody trail of destruction left in its wake. Now, with Tim by her side, she is ready to confront the evil.

The duo must unravel the terrifying truth of their past in the face of increasingly dangerous and unexplainable phenomena. There can only be one outcome when it comes to the evil they confront — an outcome born of deception, violence and murder.

Director Mike Flanagan masterfully juggles multiple layers and storylines, ratcheting up a palpable sense of foreboding and intensity in a confined space. He showed tremendous promise with his previous feature, Absentia, and is one of the most exciting new voices in the horror genre. The concept for his new film is based on a short that Flanagan made in 2006, on which he artfully expands here, touching on the age-old trend of paranormal investigation in the vein of horror classics The Haunting and The Legend of Hell House.

COLIN GEDDES