By Preston Wilder
What’s the deal with Mike Flanagan? Is he golfing buddies with Mr K-Cineplex, or just married to his niece’s cousin? The writer-director-editor’s last two films, Oculus and Before I Wake, both played Cyprus cinemas despite being low-budget horrors with little-known casts. Ouija, a 2014 chiller taking its title from the popular parlour game, never screened at the local multiplex – but Ouija: Origin of Evil, a sequel (or actually prequel) without much connection to the first film, is one of this week’s new releases. Ouija wasn’t made by Mr Flanagan; the sequel is.
Not that we’re complaining, given Flanagan’s way with the genre. I’ve never seen Ouija, but Origin of Evil – a tale of a mother and her two daughters being accosted by spirits – is almost certainly superior, a flawed but engrossing supernatural thriller that only over-topples slightly in the closing stages. Flanagan’s secret with horror movies is much like Jaume Collet-Serra’s secret in action flicks like Run All Night and The Shallows: an intense, intimate focus on the people, not quite trying to give them dimension (this is still a genre entertainment, not a serious drama) but treating their dread as legitimate – despite its being caused by things that go bump in the night – and even moving beyond dread to more complex feelings.
Dangerous obsession is a Flanagan specialty. In Oculus, the heroine’s meticulously-detailed plan to provoke a haunted mirror into revealing its secrets was almost as scary as the mirror itself. In this case we have Alice (Elizabeth Reaser), a widowed mum living with her girls, teenage Lina (Annalise Basso) and the younger Doris (Lulu Wilson), in late-60s LA, the period setting evoked by talk of Moon landings and the occasional “groovy” – and Alice makes her living as a fake medium, though she insists she’s only trying to help people. A real ghost then enters the household through a Ouija board, taking possession of little Doris – and we brace ourselves for an hour of Conjuring-style, ‘Look over there!’ ‘There’s nothing there, Doris’ clichés, but in fact it doesn’t take long for the rest of the family to become convinced. Lina remains wary – but Alice embraces the haunting, making her possessed child a partner in the no-longer-fake séances.
Mum is an ambivalent figure here, unable or unwilling to see that Doris is “changing”; it’s no accident that the TV keeps showing a film about Lizzie Borden (who took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks). Origin of Evil has some broad strokes – there’s a half-dozen jump-out-of-your-seat moments – but the film works best when it concentrates most closely on that kind of nuance, the details and unspoken glances between people. The opening scene is one example, a séance involving Alice, her client (a guilt-ridden old man seeking absolution from his dead wife) and the client’s deeply sceptical daughter; the interplay between them is delightful, the old man leaping up at every sign of a ghost while the daughter’s eyes shift suspiciously. Even better is a later scene between Alice, Lina, now-officially-evil Doris and a sympathetic local priest played by Henry Thomas (once the little boy in E.T.): the priest has something vitally important to tell the women, but the ghost can’t know that he knows. Flanagan cuts quickly from one character to another – Doris getting suspicious, Lina trying to signal her mum – the tension in the scene making clear, at the very least, why he always likes to do his own editing.
Origin of Evil isn’t quite a hidden gem, let alone a hidden masterpiece. Many of the scenes seem misjudged or just ‘too much’, notably Doris’ increasingly blood-curdling antics as the ghost ups the ante: taking a grisly revenge on a school bully, freaking out Lina’s boyfriend Mikey with a detailed description of how it feels to be strangled to death (Mikey is also the target of some cheap horror humour – “Good bones…” – which belongs in a lesser movie). Basically, when the film is trying to gross out its audience it’s like any other horror movie, when it stays more on characters it’s subtle and canny; even the possession gets some interesting notes, the spirit guiding Doris physically – “I let him use my hand,” she reports lovingly – adding a hint of violation. News arrives that Mike Flanagan’s next project (due next year) won’t be a horror film per se but a psychological suspense thriller, an adaptation of Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game – a book that takes place mostly inside one woman’s head. Sounds like a good fit.
DIRECTED BY Mike Flanagan
STARRING Annalise Basso, Elizabeth Reaser, Henry Thomas
US 2016 99 mins
