Oculus

As adults, a brother and sister return to the mirror they believe drove their father to murder their mother when they were children. She has set up cameras, timers, alarms and a kill switch to document it, scientifically, and it eats all of it.

Mike Flanagan built the film on a truly clever structure: it intercuts the childhood events with the adult experiment, and as both timelines lose their grip, the film starts cutting between them mid-action, so the characters and the audience can no longer tell past from present or real from projected.

The mirror's method is not violence but perception: it makes you eat a lightbulb thinking it is an apple, and the film makes you doubt everything you have watched.

Karen Gillan carries it and the ending refuses any comfort.

It is one of the smartest haunted-object films precisely because its haunting is epistemological.