OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL (2016)

Studio:       Universal Pictures
Director:    Mike Flanagan
Writer:       Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard
Producer:  Michael Bay, Andrew Form, Brad Fuller, Jason Blum, Brian Goldner, Stephen Davis
Stars:     Elizabeth Reaser, Annalise Basso, Lulu Wilson, Parker Mack, Henry Thomas, Kate Siegel, Eve Gordon, Doug Jones, Sam Anderson

Review Score:

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Summary:

A widow unlocks her house’s hidden secrets when a Ouija board leads her youngest daughter to become possessed.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Los Angeles – 1967 – Working out of her suburban home as a fortune teller, Alice Zander hosts a séance for skeptic Jenny and her father Mr. Browning, who is desperate to contact his dead wife Mary. Unbeknownst to the Brownings, paranormal activity at the séance is staged by Alice with the help of her teenage daughter Paulina and eight-year-old daughter Doris. Alice explains to her girls that although their psychic readings are not real, her intent is to help people. In the case of Mary Browning, Alice wanted to deter Mr. Browning from giving a large sum of his money to Jenny and her husband.

Lina sneaks out to her friend Ellie’s house. Lina and Ellie play a game of Ouija with their friends Mikey Russell and Betty. Ellie’s mother comes home unexpectedly and interrupts, forcing Alice to come over and collect her daughter. Lina suggests that Alice consider incorporating a Ouija board in her readings.

Alice meets Mikey, who takes a romantic interest in Lina. At the girls’ school, Alice witnesses the principal, Father Tom Hogan, berating two boys for bullying Doris.

Alice purchases a Ouija board and rigs it with magnets. While asking questions aloud to test her board manipulation technique, Alice unknowingly contacts a spirit named Marcus. In another room of the house at the same time, Doris becomes momentarily possessed as Marcus speaks through her.

Doris uses the board alone and contacts a spirit. A supernatural presence pulls off Lina’s bed sheet while she sleeps.

Father Tom calls Alice to school when Doris turns in homework written in cursive, despite having not been taught the handwriting style. The Zander women come home to a foreclosure notice on their front door.

Believing she is communicating with her deceased father Roger, Doris again uses the Ouija board alone. The spirit leads her to a secret compartment hidden behind a basement wall where she finds a pouch full of cash.

After presenting the money to her mother, Doris explains that she can contact Roger with the Ouija board. Alice, Doris, and Lina have a Ouija session during which the planchette moves on its own. When the board answers a question only Roger would seemingly know the answer to, Alice begins believing that they are in contact with her dead husband. Lina remains unconvinced.

Father Tom asks Lina why he hasn’t seen Doris in school for several days. Alice keeps Doris at home to channel spirits through the board for legitimate psychic readings. During one session, Doris briefly speaks in another person’s voice. Afterward, Doris begins feeling a sharp pain in her neck.

Doris sees shadowy figures when looking through the planchette. Doris is led to a mirror where a dark creature appears, bending Doris backward and putting its hand into her throat while she is possessed. That evening, Lina has a nightmare in which her mouth closes over after her sister whispers in her ear.

At school, Doris supernaturally compels a bully to fire a slingshot into his own face.

Alice goes out to dinner with Father Tom. With the girls home alone, Mikey comes over briefly to see Lina. When he leaves, Doris explains to Mikey what it feels like to be strangled.

Lina becomes incensed when she finds the mouth defaced on a doll given to her by her father. Doris denies being responsible, leading to an argument between Lina and Alice over the Ouija board and Doris’ increasingly worrisome behavior. Lina insists that if they spirit they are contacting is really Roger, then it would not be corrupting Doris.

Lina finds papers written in Polish by Doris and brings them to Father Tom for Sister Hannah to translate. Father Tom later comes to the house for a Ouija session with Doris and Alice under the pretense of contacting his dead wife Gloria.

After the session, Father Tom pulls Alice and Lina aside to explain that Doris did not contact Gloria, but was somehow able to read his thoughts by repeating the answers he was thinking in his mind while questioning the supposed spirit.

Meanwhile, Mikey comes to the house. Doris takes Mikey into the basement to show him the secret compartment behind the wall.

Father Tom further explains that the translated pages Doris wrote form the journal of a Polish man named Marcus. Marcus was a concentration camp prisoner during WWII. His journal references “The Devil’s Doctor,” a Nazi who experimented on prisoners. After the war, Marcus discovered that “The Devil’s Doctor” escaped to America where he continued his experiments in a secret room hidden beneath the Zander house. The doctor cut out the tongues of his victims so that their scream would not be heard in the house above. The spirits of the victims as well as the doctor have been haunting the house ever since.

While possessed, Doris twists Mikey’s neck, whispering into his ear after killing him.

Father Tom suggests an exorcism for Doris. When he, Alice, and Lina go back downstairs, Mikey’s body drops suddenly from a noose.

Alice, Lina, and Tom go into the cellar to look for Doris and to burn the Ouija board. In the hidden space behind the wall, Tom discovers a stack of skeletons left behind from the evil doctor’s experiments. Everyone realizes that they have effectively been using the Ouija board in a graveyard all this time, which is against one of the game’s three core rules. They throw the board into the furnace.

Following the sounds of an old phonograph and Doris’ cries, Tom crawls through a duct to find the doctor’s secret room. Tom confronts Doris. Possessed, Doris floats quickly toward Tom.

Tom returns to Alice and Lina possessed. After chasing the two women with a blade, Tom momentarily regains clarity and becomes trapped in the basement. From upside down on the ceiling, Doris screams in Tom’s direction, causing him to fly backward and break his neck on the staircase.

Alice and Lina return to the main room and find the Ouija board mysteriously intact on the table. Both women are supernaturally attacked. Doris whispers into her unconscious sister’s ear following an attack from Mikey’s corpse. Alice pleads with the spirit to release her daughters and take her instead. Alice is attacked and pulled away.

A vision of her father moves Lina to her bed. Lina relives an earlier moment when she discovered her defaced doll and realizes that she needs to sew Doris’ mouth shut to quiet the voices and stop the evil.

Doris chains up Alice in the secret room. Lina confronts her possessed sister. While sewing Doris mouth closed, dark demons claw at Lina. However, Lina succeeds and the demons vanish.

Alice breaks her hand to escape her restraints. While she grieves over Doris’ death, Lina explains through tears that it was the only way to stop the voices.

Lina becomes momentarily possessed and stabs her mother. Lina is horrified by her action when she regains clarity. While dying, Alice sees a vision of Roger and Doris together. Lina cries.

Two months later, Lina, now committed to a mental hospital, is interviewed by a doctor trying to determine what happened to Doris’ body. While alone in her room, Lina constructs Ouija board on the floor by writing letters in blood and using an eyeglass lens as a planchette. Lina tries summoning her sister.

The doctor walks by in the hallway and briefly sees Lina sitting on her bed with Doris. When he returns for a closer look, Lina is alone. Doris appears on the hallway ceiling behind the doctor, running quickly toward him.

In 2013, Lina, now an elderly woman still in the asylum, receives a visit from someone claiming to be her niece.

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Review:

By forgetting virtually everything about “Ouija” (review here) in the two years since that one-and-done viewing, I made it all the way into the last act of “Ouija: Origin of Evil” before realizing characters and events tie directly into the first film.  That’s a good thing.  Someone with the original fresher on the mind is likely to recognize certain names straight away and experience the sequel/prequel as a second chapter in a larger arc.  Those who didn’t see or didn’t care for “Ouija” on the other hand, will never feel out of any loop.  One way “Origin of Evil” is uniquely entertaining is that it fits flawlessly as both a follow-up and a standalone story.

Set in 1967 Los Angeles, “Origin of Evil” tells the tale of fortune teller Alice Zander and her two daughters: teenager Lina and eight-year-old Doris.  Alice runs sham psychic medium séances out of her modest suburban home, but has honest intentions of helping clients make peace with personal problems.  At least, that’s what she says to wrangle in Doris on the smoke while Lina takes care of the mirrors.

Looking to amp up the illusion, Alice adds a Ouija board to her act, elevating the atmosphere from “for entertainment purposes only” to supernaturally serious.  Using the board opens an unseen paranormal portal.  That portal goes directly through Doris, who becomes a conduit for several spirits, one of whom claims to be the girls’ dead father Roger.  When that spirit leads Doris to a hidden chamber behind a wall in the basement, the little girl inadvertently kickstarts a mystery connected to the house’s secret history.  Once Doris’ behavior begins changing as a result, Alice realizes that what she thought was a harmless game might have sinister side effects on her daughter.

“Ouija: Origin of Evil” is a rarity in PG-13 horror in that its accessibility attracts a younger set without having to dumb down scares or story to the point of being unintelligent for an adult audience.  The feel of the film plays perfectly into director Mike Flanagan’s strength at setting a tone of under-the-skin terror.  Not everyone clicks with the slow burn style seen in his previous films such as “Absentia” (review here) or “Oculus” (review here), but there are more moments of energized eeriness here, particularly in the film’s “throttle you by the throat” climax.

“Origin of Evil” is the most commercial of Flanagan’s films to date.  This means a healthy smattering of traditional jump scares is included.  But the terrific thing about the jolts is none of them feel cheap.  These moments play as organic components of what is already occurring in a scene, woven into the story’s momentum instead of into an artificial gotcha.

The film incorporates a plethora of tropes throughout.  Waking suddenly from a dream, a secret room hidden behind a basement wall, a crackling phonograph adding to mood, even an evil Nazi.  Yet there is never a sense of misuse when playing with these conventions.  Even derivative elements fill contextual functions by only employing a cliché instead of exploiting it.

Watch when Lina recalls a clue unknowingly received earlier.  The usual way a movie plays this moment is by cutting to flashback footage or looping echoing audio to remind the audience of something said previously.  Here, Lina instead relives the other scene from a new perspective as a phantom figure.  It’s only a slight switch on routine staging, though that sort of creativity offers an edge that puts “Origin of Evil” a step above similar supernatural chillers.

When a character says, “splitting up seems like the stupidest thing to do,” you can see the wheels at work of a smart filmmaker who understands the beats needed to massage mass market appeal, yet tweaks expectations so as not to compromise integrity.  It’s the same impression that comes from James Wan’s movies, where a skilled filmmaker’s technical abilities work in concert with a reverence for genre entertainment to create something distinctive from facets that feel familiar.

Starting with a throwback Universal Pictures logo, “Ouija: Origin of Evil” is an effective period piece not only in setting but also in presentation.  CGI enhancements aside, Flanagan and cinematographer Michael Fimognari generally limit themselves to 1960s technology.  Reel change dots, split diopter shots, lens zooms instead of camera cranes: every technique combines for an immersive retro horror experience that is stylishly scary.

Lulu Wilson delivers a convincingly chilling performance as Doris that is the best by a child actor in a horror film since Noah Wiseman of “The Babadook” (review here).  Watch the expression on her face during a séance with Henry Thomas to see her range of natural ability going far beyond simply delivering dialogue on cue.  The inherent maturity in Wilson’s presence is an uncanny enhancement to her character’s hypnotic quality of being possessed by a malevolent presence.

Many of these checks in the “Pro” column are the same as those in the “Cons” for fans of different persuasions.  Chock full of relentless shocks, the conclusion may actually be overstuffed on intensity, some of which is deflated by predictability.  Some may also see Mike Flanagan’s nods to influences including “The Exorcist,” “The Changeling,” even “House by the Cemetery” as leaning too much on a trodden trail instead of as earnest homage.  Then there is still the sour sting on the tongue from the disappointment of this film’s predecessor.

That last concern is easier to extinguish.  Never mind how you may have felt about the first film.  See “Ouija: Origin of Evil” for how it reinvigorates the franchise through dark drama motivating mood and it emerges as a harder-hitting horror film than its predecessor, ranking alongside “The Conjuring” (review here) as a memorably mesmerizing thriller with substance to match its style.

NOTE: There is a post-credits scene.

Review Score:  85

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