Brenton Thwaites and Karen Gillian star in “Oculus.”¦ Rating: R for terror, violence, some disturbing images.¦ Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.
By Roger Moore
The women do the heavy lifting in “Oculus,” this April’s “Insidious,” a complex and chilling big-screen ghost story with serious movie-date potential.
“Doctor Who” alumna Karen Gillan sheds her Scots accent and most outward signs of emotion as Kaylie, a young woman who went through something terrible and, she is convinced, something supernatural 11 years before. Now, she’s out to prove that and “kill it,” the thing that killed her parents and put her brother into a mental institution for more than a decade.
The “thing” that did this: an ornate, Baroque mirror, which seemed to possess her parents and, when she and her brother were little, tricked them out of destroying it.