Lou Lumenick

Lou Lumenick

Movies

Supernatural sleeper ‘Oculus’ tells chillingly twisted tale

If you’ve just been discharged after 11 years in a mental institution, it’s probably not a great idea to join your sister for a night in the same house where you killed Dad — while he was trying to strangle your sister just after emptying a revolver into your homicidally insane mom.

Credit Mike Flanagan’s clever, twisty and scary supernatural sleeper “Oculus’’ for skillfully selling its preposterous premise, though: that the very tightly wound Kaylie (Karen Gillan of “Doctor Who’’), now 23, could somehow convince 21-year-old sibling Tim (Brenton Thwaites) that it would be cathartic for both of them to prove that their late parents were innocent victims of demonic possession.

Kaylie has elaborately rigged up the conveniently unsold old family home with an impressive array of paranormal recording and safety devices.

Karen Gillan stars in “Oculus.”John Estes/Lasser Productions

And, more important, she’s gone to work for an auction house in order to temporarily return the demonic piece de resistance to Dad’s old den: an antique mirror with a significant crack.

Poor Tim starts wondering if Kaylie is ready for her own padded room when she starts producing computer printouts that she claims link the mirror to more than 40 gruesome deaths going back to 17th-century Scotland.

Then plants start dying — the first sign of Mom’s deteriorating mental health — and the siblings start suffering from delusions that don’t quite match the playbacks on Kaylie’s iMacs.

Director Flanagan ratchets up the suspense by intercutting their scenes with flashbacks of the younger Kaylie and Tim (Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan, good matches for the older actors), who become increasingly terrified by the bizarre behavior of Dad (Rory Cochrane) and Mom (Katee Sackhoff).

Was dear old Dad really having an affair with a mysterious woman in his den, the older versions of Tim and Kaylie wonder — or did the mirror plant that idea (which they conveyed to Mom) in their heads? Shocks abound as the lines between delusion and reality are repeatedly crossed during the evening.

Like the similar, and slightly superior, “The Conjuring’’ last summer, “Oculus’’ eschews the buckets of gore common to R-rated horror movies and takes a relatively subtle, psychological approach — even if the somewhat disappointing ending leaves the door open for a sequel (or three).