Oui­ja: Ori­gin of Evil

It’s 1967 – even the Uni­ver­sal logo has a dis­tinct­ly ​’60s look to it – and Doris Zan­der (Lulu Wil­son) is being bul­lied by two boys in the school play­ground. ​“You know why peo­ple say mean things?” the school’s priest Father Tom Hagen (ET​’s Hen­ry Thomas), after inter­ven­ing, says to Doris. ​“Because they’re scared. Makes me feel kin­da sor­ry for them, how about you?”

One of sev­er­al things that makes Oui­ja: Ori­gin of Evil stand out from the rest of the main­stream hor­ror pack is this sense of real com­pas­sion that it estab­lish­es even for its most mali­cious char­ac­ters, shown to be vic­tims as much as aggres­sors. Any­one who saw and still actu­al­ly remem­bers Stiles White’s improb­a­ble (and high­ly for­get­table) Has­bro-Blum­house co-pro­duc­tion Oui­ja from 2014 will know that Doris her­self is des­tined to become the stitch-mouthed evil spir­it who brings hell to the lives of post-mil­len­ni­al co-eds – but here she is, half a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er, sweet, lov­ing and inno­cent, and com­mand­ing our sym­pa­thies. After all, she is grap­pling, at age nine, not only with bul­ly­ing but with the absence of her father, whose death she still does not understand.

Doris and her teenaged sis­ter Pauli­na (Annalise Bas­so) help their wid­owed moth­er Alice (Eliz­a­beth Reas­er) with a séance scam through which she rais­es mon­ey rather than the dead – although Alice’s inten­tions are essen­tial­ly good, as she helps oth­ers work through the grief and loss that she too is suf­fer­ing. When Alice adds a rigged Oui­ja board to the per­for­mance, Doris makes what appears to be longed-for con­tact with their late father, to Alice’s delight – but there are enti­ties from beyond who have learnt a few tricks of their own from Alice’s con­fi­dence act, and are des­per­ate to find a voice to com­mu­ni­cate the atroc­i­ties per­pe­trat­ed against them.

Oui­ja: Ori­gin of Evil is book­end­ed by two 20^th cen­tu­ry events that showed the heights and depths that human­i­ty can reach. As the Zan­der women under­go their domes­tic ordeal, there is much back­ground chat­ter about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a flight to the Moon (which would, of course, hap­pen two years lat­er); and their home turns out to be a char­nel-house mau­soleum for the deprav­i­ties of the Holo­caust. The film sit­u­ates its rest­less spir­its some­where between these two Poles, let­ting us hate their sins even as we under­stand the sin­ners, so that we see not just the worst but also the best of human­i­ty – includ­ing, con­trary to genre cliché, a school priest who does not prey upon his young wards, and a teen ​‘Romeo’ who is respect­ful to his girlfriend’s desire to stay a virgin.

In mak­ing a pre­quel to White’s film, direc­tor and co-writer (with Jeff Howard) Mike Flana­gan not only goes right back to the begin­ning (while ques­tion­ing whether there ever real­ly is such a thing), but also brings to the mate­r­i­al his own spe­cial stamp. For if Flanagan’s 2011 debut Absen­tia and 2013 fol­low-up Ocu­lus both con­cerned sib­lings haunt­ed by loss and ghost­ly returns, then those motifs are brought over (from the oth­er side) into Oui­ja: Ori­gin of Evil. The film is a retroac­tive response to The Exor­cist as much as to Oui­ja, com­ing with all the scares expect­ed from a Blum­house pro­duc­tion, but also with well-drawn, like­able char­ac­ters whose fates engage us and pos­sess our anx­ious emotions.

The way that Alice and her daugh­ters first pull back the cur­tain on their own bogus hocus-pocus act before encoun­ter­ing some­thing more gen­uine­ly super­nat­ur­al (if still with its own per­for­ma­tive aspects) serves also to reflect the way that Oui­ja: Ori­gin of Evil decon­structs and then recon­structs the tropes of the first film into a smarter, creepi­er blur­ring of fact and fak­ery. Per­haps clever­est of all, Oui­ja: Ori­gin of Evil reveals nei­ther true evil, nor true ori­gin: for its ghosts, like Lulu’s bul­ly­ing tor­men­tors, are them­selves vic­tims act­ing out of fear; and they have their own source, fur­ther back in time, open­ing up the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a pre-pre­quel and pre-pre-pre­quel, deferred end­less­ly into the future. It’s a wise com­men­tary on the elu­sive nature of both ori­gins, and of evil, which rarely obey the rules of any game. Goodbye.