Oculus, Sanity, and Gaslighting

If you have a Netflix subscription and like your horror with a side of Lovecraftian mind-fuckery, you might be interested in checking out Mike Flanagan’s Oculus. The film follows two grown siblings, sister Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites) who shared in a twisted and abusive childhood. Kaylie has been leading a successful life working at an auction house, while Tim has just been released from the mental hospital. Tim is ready to embrace life and freedom, and to forget the past that got him locked away to begin with. But Kaylie has other ideas; she’s tracked down the Lasser Glass, an antique mirror she believes caused their childhood torment by driving their parents insane. And she needs Tim to help her destroy it.

At first glance, the premise of Oculus pretty standard cornball for horror films: a family acquires a demonic mirror, chaos and tragedy ensue. But the real genius in Oculus, and where so many “haunted object” films fail, is in its storytelling, frenetically shifting between the past and the present, as well as between truth and the reality the Glass wants you to see, mirroring (ugh, God, I’m SO sorry) the madness experienced by the characters. The film itself, in both direction and design, is very, very pretty (GOD do I want a less-Eldritch version of that mirror for my apartment), and Karen Gillan shines in her first ever mainstream film role. If you haven’t watched it and you don’t mind a bit of disorientation with your dread, this film is where it’s at.

I could go on for pages about what Oculus does right and how refreshing I found it, but at the end of the day I came here to drink smoothies and talk feminism, and I’m all out of smoothie. While the film centers on both of the siblings, our protagonist is clearly the older sister. We want to believe Kaylie is right about the mirror. She embodies everything we want to see in horror movies: she’s resourceful, she takes precautions, and she does her best to neither underestimate the forces she’s dealing with nor overestimate her own strength against it. Most importantly, she refuses to believe she’s wrong.

Her younger brother, on the other hand, has just spent 11 years in an institution designed to rid him of his “delusions” about the Glass and help him come to terms with the “real” reason he shot his abusive father. He spends the majority of the film projecting these ideas onto Kaylie, attempting to give more believable explanations for her recollections of their upbringing. To each sibling, the other is clearly in the wrong, their minds warped by time and either internal or external psychological manipulation.

So let’s talk about the concept of gaslighting. For those who may not know the phrase, gaslighting is what occurs when someone (usually a man) manipulates someone else (almost always a woman) into believing that they are insane. The term comes from a play, and later a film, from around 1940-ish called Gas Light, and I’d tell you what happens in it, but you can probably hazard a guess. Now, in this film it’s hard to say Tim is intentionally gaslighting Kaylie. He clearly believes she is delusional because he’s been made to believe that he, himself, is also delusional.  His insistences are motivated by his interest in her wellbeing rather than as a means to his own ends or any kind of malevolence toward her. But at its core, one major conflict in this movie centers on a man attempting to convince a woman that her ability to interpret reality has been compromised.

What’s important about the film and about Kaylie as a character is that she never once waivers. At the beginning of Oculus, we have two opposing camps. Kaylie is completely convinced that the mirror has the ability to manipulate its surroundings psychologically and electrically. Tim knows his memory is unreliable and that it is far more likely he and his sister fabricated the mirror as an enemy to explain the trauma they were subjected to. Over the course of the film, however, despite Tim’s repeated explanations and insistences, it is Tim who in the end is convinced of the mirror’s power. Regardless of your reading of the film or acceptance of the mirror’s malevolence, what is important is that Kaylie is stronger than her brother psychologically. Kaylie trusts herself. She trusts her memory, and she trusts her own judgment.

Unfortunately, however, that isn’t enough to save her in the end. Now, you can view her death as well-deserved punishment for taunting forces she didn’t fully comprehend, OR you can choose to view it as (failed) heroic effort to bring herself peace, the mirror justice, and her brother exoneration not only from the world, but also from himself. I don’t want to give you the impression that her character is somehow altruistic; Kaylie wants revenge for the destruction the Lasser Glass wrought on her family, which is apparent in her initial taunts of the mirror.  But she could easily have let the anchor swing as soon as she had hung the Glass and we would have had a much shorter film. (Aside: this film is actually based on a short film called Oculus: Chapter 3 – The Man with the Plan, which I have not seen and know nothing about. Maybe that’s what happens in that film. Let me know if you’ve seen it.) What is important to Kaylie, however, isn’t the mere destruction of the mirror; it’s that her brother and parents are cleared. It isn’t enough for Kaylie to know she’s right. She has to prove it, irrefutably, on camera, to the world. That is her minimum requirement for justice, and she ends up failing on every single count.

Her brother is spared, left once again to take the blame for the mirror’s violence. There could be a dozen reasons, be it poetic symmetry, poetic justice, or some unpoetic combination of the two involving mere intentional bleakness. I believe, however, that the Lasser Glass chooses to kill her specifically because she is so strong. It let her live once, and she spent the next 11 years learning its history, studying its secrets, and discovering its weaknesses. Her death is not treated by the film as gleeful or deserved. The mirror is scared of her, and it won’t make the mistake of leaving her alive again.

Oculus is a solid horror film that plays on one of my deepest, most personal fears, the loss of mental capacity. It is a beautifully made slow-burning thriller that says some very interesting things about sanity and truth. Most importantly, it presents us with a tragic hero hell-bent on avenging her family who damn near succeeds- and who just so happens to be a lady. She very nearly outsmarts the Glass, and the Glass makes her pay for it. Most importantly, in the face of absurdity (“A haunted mirror made my dad chain my mom to the wall!”), she never once doubts herself.