Mike Flanagan’s 2013 horror film Oculus is on Netflix right now. It’s the movie where a lot of his recurring obsessions really come into focus first, the ones that would later run through The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, Doctor Sleep, and even his 2026 Prime Video version of Stephen King’s Carrie.
Flanagan’s second feature after Absentia, adapted from his 2005 short Oculus: Chapter 3 – The Man with the Plan, follows siblings Kaylie and Tim Russell, played by Karen Gillan and Brenton Thwaites, as they set out to destroy the cursed Lasser Glass. They’re convinced the mirror drove their parents into madness and led to their deaths.
Writing with Jeff Howard, Flanagan keeps the mirror’s backstory mostly in the dark. What he leans on instead is fractured reality, past and present folding into each other, shaky perception, and the kind of family trauma that would become one of the clearest through-lines in his later work.
If you came to Flanagan through the bigger streaming shows, Oculus is absolutely one to catch. I went back to it, and Karen Gillan still gives the movie its center of gravity, anchoring a tight, emotionally cutting little horror film.
Oculus made more than $44 million worldwide against a budget of around $5 million, and it later got a 2017 Bollywood remake, Dobaara: See Your Evil.
You can stream Oculus on Netflix now.
Author: Jesús Bosque
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