Eleven years after killing his own father (played by Rory Cochrane) who had in turn murdered mother (played by Katee Sackhoff), Brenton Thwaites is released from a psychiatric hospital and greeted outside by sister Karen Gillan. Gillan is committed to keeping a promise they made as kids. They believed that their father was a good man driven homicidally mad by an evil mirror that was in their house, and which also caused their mother to become paranoid and psychologically unstable, prior to her death. However, Thwaites seems rather reluctant, having spent the last 11 years looking at things more rationally and coming to the conclusion that dad was simply evil and that all the mirror stuff was just delusion on his part.
Basically, he wants to move on. Gillan, however, has been forced to deal with things on her own over the years and is more determined than ever to see the mirror (which she has managed to acquire in a manner not really worth getting into here) defeated and in recording things on camera, to see her, her brother, and their parents finally vindicated.
Its premise is founded on something cheesy, it’s co-produced by the dubious WWE Studios, and the trailer didn’t look remotely scary, so I was expecting a turkey here. However, this 2014 horror pic from director Mike Flanagan and co-writer Jeff Howard (who also collaborated on “Before I Wake” with Kate Bosworth) is surprisingly interesting and enjoyable. It’s not remotely scary, but that has never been a pre-requisite for a horror movie for me.
Although founded on a cliché (the spooky inanimate object of EVIL) the plot is actually really interesting, it’s pretty well-acted, and the characters grabbed me more than those in the slightly overrated “The Conjuring”. I actually cared about these characters, especially the central pair played by Karen Gillan and Brenton Thwaites. I’m not sure I quite believed sci-fi dream woman Katee Sackhoff as a woman who feels unattractive, but Rory Cochrane (as the moody father) is even better at being James Brolin in “Amityville Horror” than James Brolin was. OK, so that’s not a hard thing to achieve, but still it deserves mention. I was worried that the non-linear narrative would have the same side effect of “The Conjuring” that it would lessen the potential for terror as you’re continually taken out of context.
However, as I said, being scary isn’t always crucial, and the reason for the non-linear structure/narrative is at least interesting. Scottish actress Karen Gillan is really good at suggesting a troubled past that hasn’t yet been overcome, and does so without being hammy. I must admit that her distractingly swishy pony tail did get on my nerves early on, though, and she looks the polar opposite of her supposed brother, tanned Aussie actor Brenton Thwaites. Thwaites’ best moments are those in which he actually just reacts, instead of speaking, you can see on his face alone that he, like Gillan hasn’t fully recovered from their past tragedy.
The film’s few attempts to genuinely scare you are lame ‘jump’ scares (which I still say ‘startle’ you, not ‘scare’ you), and some of them don’t even have an adequate enough build-up to work. That’s the worst kind of ‘jump’ scare. So, even though I don’t require horror films to be scary, this one was admittedly trying and failing. It doesn’t derail the film, though, as everything else makes up for the lack of fright. However, I can’t deny that it’s the one flaw with the film that prevents it from being even better than it is. As for the ending, insofar as I understood it, boy is that a cruel bugger of a closer. That’s just plain mean!
OVERALL SUMMARY
Although it lacks genuine terror, this horror film has an interesting plot, characters you care about, more than decent performances, and a good music score. That’s more than a lot of horror films have these days. I was pleasantly surprised by this one.
