Oculus is a horror movie about a killer mirror that kills people, with death.
It jumps back and forth between an adult brother and sister investigating it in the present day and their earlier childhood experiences with its misdeeds, when it terrorized their family.
It’s awards season, and there’s no shortage of commentary. I might chime in myself in a few weeks. (Spoilers: Boyhood, Ida, The Immigrant, Under The Skin, and Noah would win all the things if it were up to me, and Uma Thurman would get a best Supporting Actress nod for Nymphomaniac Vol 1 — it is not, it turns out, up to me.)
From its arthouse title to its opening act, drawing heavily on Dario Argento’s color palette and prog-rock scores, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears announces itself as a meta-genre movie, aimed pretty squarely at fans of giallo and exploitation, though straddling a line into the uncanny just enough to please the David Lynch and Bunuel fans in the crowd.
Reflecting, in 1967, on the experience of seeing old movies on TV, notorious curmudgeon/amazing writer Pauline Kael wrote, “Horror and fantasy films … are surprisingly effective, perhaps because they are so primitive in their appeal that the qualities of the imagery matter less than the basic suggestions.