Navigating Shared Trauma in Mike Flanagan’s ‘Oculus’

Oculus, the 2014 movie written and directed by Mike Flanagan, and adapted from his own short film, is a film that finds itself in the unenviable position of having been generally well-received and a box office success, but which has since fallen into the shadow of his more recent and more popular Netflix productions. Starring Karen Gillan (in one of her first post-Doctor Who roles) and Brenton Thwaites (Maleficent, The Signal) as Kaylie and Tim Russell, siblings who reunite after Tim’s 11-year confinement to a psychiatric hospital following his murder of their father—a murder which both children had blamed on an antique mirror hanging in their father’s home office.

The film has the trappings of several prior haunted house/object stories—most notably, those in which a family member is seduced or possessed into killing their loved ones, only to die themselves or be carted away as insane, like The Amityville Horror (1979) or The Shining (1980)—but Oculus is a movie with a twist up its sleeve. The film isn’t about the haunting so much as it is Kaylie’s quest to prove the haunting. That is, her quest to absolve, not only her brother of their father’s murder, but their father for their abuse and neglect, and their mother for her own psychotic break. While the film metes out memories of the time of the haunting as it progresses, the majority of the action takes place in the present, as Kaylie tries to recreate the conditions that got them into the mess in the first place. Having spent most of the past 11 years researching the antique known as the Lasser Glass, Kaylie swipes the mirror from her auction house employer, placing it on the same wall in their old house (vacant ever since the murder), surrounded by a number of safeguards designed, not only to capture evidence of any supernatural occurrences, but protect Kaylie and Tim from its seductive influences.

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In addition to playing on the expected focus of the film, Oculus also tinkers with the (admittedly broad) symbolism of mirrors in film. Rather than focusing on the mirror’s ability to reflect a character’s inner or subconscious thoughts, which I’ve touched on previously with The Entity (1982), Flanagan uses the mirror to represent Kaylie’s desire to, as Kimberly Jackson suggests in Gender and the Nuclear Family in Twenty-First Century Horror, “return the family to the mirror stage” (166), referring to Jacques Lacan’s theory involving the childhood formation of the ego. I don’t want to go too heavily into Jackson’s analysis here (if interested, I’d highly recommend checking out her book directly), I only mention it as an important contrast to my previous discussion of mirrors, and to highlight this film’s unique family dynamic—which itself has become a hallmark of Flanagan’s early works. 

Oculus, Image via IMDb.

While Oculus doesn’t grapple with some of Flanagan’s other heavier recurring themes (like religion or addiction), obsession, mental illness, and embattled familial relationships are very much in play. Much of the film’s conflict comes not from the haunted mirror—at least not directly—but from now-rehabilitated Tim’s arguments with Kaylie, who still refuses to accept Tim’s, and their father’s, apparent guilt. While Kaylie goes into detail describing for Tim the mirror’s long history and her plan to end its reign of terror, Tim spends much of his time countering with his own findings from his years of concentrated therapy designed to pierce these delusions and accept responsibility for his actions.

Because of this, Oculus frequently finds itself presenting conflicting versions of the events that took place leading up to the family’s tragedy. Memory, it turns out, isn’t always the most reliable recordkeeper when it comes to traumatic events. What’s more, the mirror appears able to present conflicting versions of current events, as well. Several times throughout the film, Kaylie and Tim find themselves hallucinating objects, movements, and even each other, even when not reliving their trauma through vivid flashbacks. The scariest part is that the mirror’s influence seems to be absolute—Kaylie’s belief that technology might be used as a filter through which to pierce the mirror’s illusions is roundly shattered, as are attempts to escape the mirror’s reach by leaving the house. 

Although Kaylie’s goal is a noble one, the mirror’s tricks prove that she, at best, fails to understand the limits of its power and, at worst, is willfully ignorant of her own untreated illness which the mirror represents. By focusing all of her energies on the mirror and its destruction, and because of her insistence on playing the role of the mother-figure that she and Tim were robbed of, Kaylie is blinded to Tim’s attempts to prove his growth and willingness to include Kaylie in his healing process. Tim’s acceptance of his doctors’ perspective that their parents had both been ill (and his acceptance of responsibility for his father’s death) stands in stark contrast to Kaylie’s feverish obsession with recording proof of the mirror’s supernaturality and washing away the sins of her family. Her desperate attempts to prevent history from repeating itself become a self-fulfilling prophecy that could have been entirely avoided had she sought the kind of help that Tim had access to for the past 11 years.

Oculus is a film that doesn’t get much attention in comparison to Flanagan’s other projects, but I think it has an awful lot to say about how we manage our own pain and how we, at times, mistakenly interpret having lived through trauma as meaning we are the only ones equipped to successfully navigate it—particularly when the trauma was a shared one to begin with. Solutions and healing rarely come in black and white, and rarer still is the opportunity to erase a past wrong. In most cases, acceptance and reconciliation are the better, healthier ways of dealing with your skeletons—or your mirrors.

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Article written by Ande Thomas

Ande loves the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown. He writes about monsters and foreign horror and can also be found over on Letterboxd.

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