When you’re all alone in a cavernous cinema watching a horror film the calibre of Ouija: Origin Of Evil, a prequel by Oculus director Mike Flanagan and his co-writer Jeff Howard to the commercially successful but critically panned Ouija, it fair makes the hairs on the back of your neck bristle as thoughts of being watched take root.

With its taut script, fine performances, stark cinematography, nerve-jangling score, sparse but effective jump out your simmet sequences and initially slow but gradually speedy ratcheting up of the tension, it’s little surprise that the film has earned favourable reviews and to date taken over eight times its $9m budget at the box office.

Elizabeth Reaser plays Alice Zander, a widower who along with her daughters Lina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson) run a fake fortune-telling business from home to “comfort not judge” the grieving. With a theatrical flourish of a curtain and a knowing “Let’s begin”, the stage is set for their first clients of the day: an elderly man and his cynical daughter who is after her father’s savings. A tumbler sides, a candle flickers, things go bump in the night.

But their just-breaking-even family business takes a turn for the worse when an eviction notice is served and Alice’s youngest daughter Doris borrows a line from The Sixth Sense and claims that she can “see dead people”. Not only see them, but hear them, talk like them and literally bend over backwards to channel them. As is the way in horror films, a priest is called in the shape of Henry Thomas as Father Tom Hogan.

Is she really communicating with the dead? Is she at it? Or is she a letter short of a Ouija board? On the surface it’s fairly run-of-the-mill stuff with the genre’s staple components of gloomy basements, creaking floorboards, creepy dolls and mirrored reflections firmly intact, but the subtle and stylish manner in which they are presented makes for a satisfying hour and a half of switch-off-the-brain, exquisitely framed entertainment. Thumbs up? To use Ouija-speak: Y E S.

Video courtesy of: Universal Pictures

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Peter Callaghan
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