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Ah yes, the trusty Ouija board. Where would the horror genre be without that infamous bit of kit that lets generations of idiot teens chat to the dead like it was some sort of hotline for the damned? Well, judging by this 2014 attempt to put the spotlight back on the spirit channelling item, the horror genre would be just fine, as Stiles White’s Ouija fails to hold interest despite featuring both a legitimate up and comer and a respected veteran in the cast.
I’ve always found Ouija boards to be quite an ineffective tool for fear myself, because you’re only in danger if you actually play with the thing – which in my mind automatically makes it about as threatening as a game of Mousetrap, or Connect 4. Maybe my natural adversion to board games makes me immune to such details thanks to numerous hellish Christmases playing Trivial Pursuit with the in-laws but couldn’t you simply just not play?
When they were kids, Debbie and Laine used to while away the hours playing with their trusty Ouija board and communing with the great beyond. However, years later, we find Debbie playing with a much more ornate version; but in a mysterious act of self preservation, she throws the offending plaything into her fire to destroy it. Unfortunately, this fails to stop whatever paranormal doings that are going on, and after the offending board somehow reappears magically unharmed, Debbie is possessed by some sort of force and promptly hangs herself.
While I guess this technically means that Ouija Boards should be classified as a choking hazard, Debbie’s friends are all shocked at her apparent suicide, but none of them take it as hard, or as personally as Laine. Obsessed about getting in contact with her late best friend in order to discover why she took her own life, she convinces boyfriend Trevor, sister Sarah, Isabelle and Debbie’s boyfriend Pete, to whip out that titular board and reach out and touch someone – on the other side. But after making contact with someone they assume is Debbie, weird things soon start to happen, such as the phrase “Hi Friend” showing up written in various places for each one of them. It soon becomes apparent that the dead person they were communicating with was not Debbie, and some malevolent force has targeted this group in order to possess and kill them in ways that look like suicide or a freak accident.
Switching from bereaved friends to threatened Scooby gang, Laine and the survivors have to try and unravel the mystery of the Ouija Board if they hope to not join Debbie in the afterlife; but after Laine looks into the history of Debbie’s house, she discovers about Doris Zander, her medium mother, Alice, and their abusive relationship that may be the key to solving this.
There’s something about Ouija that feels like it’s desperately trying to be something along the lines of a My First Horror film. The movie strings together a bunch of teens who feel like they’re soulless copies of the type of young adults that usually populate a Wes Craven film, while the attempted scares resemble the type of shocks you’d get in a James Wan ghost film along the lines of Insidious and The Conjuring – but only far more neutered. In addition to all of this, it also carries the residue of a motion picture that’s had every extraneous second of plot stripped out of it by nervous producers in order to maximise the scares and shorten the runtime for a younger audience. As for the result? Well, you don’t need to consult a Ouiji Board to discover that the finished film is woefully ineffective and exceedingly dull, but the fact that it’s so derivative and lacking any sort of edge whatsoever means that it’s more of a Oujia bored.
However, while the movie ambles through toothless accident/suicide kills that make The Final Destination look like The Omen, and a mystery that makes no sense because it’s too bland to fully concentrate on, a big surprise is that it contains an early starring role for Olivia Cooke, who went on to star in the likes of Bates Motel, Ready Player One and House Of The Dragon. To give the actress her due, she valiantly tries her best with material more lifeless than the spirits she’s trying to raise, but not even her budding talents can elevate a film that depends solely on the stupidity of its main characters. Trying to use grief as some sort of metaphor for Laine to insist on using the Ouija to contact her dead friend, there could have been some neat things to say about survivors guilt after the shock suicide of a loved one.
Given more room to breathe, the notion of someone harnessing arcane powers in order to get closure over a friend’s death actually could of carried a fair amount of emotional weight, but it speeds through matters so fast, that Laine’s insistence of roping all of her friends together to screw with the paranormal just makes them all seem rash and stupid.
Even the inclusion of ghost movie royalty, Lin Shaye, isn’t enough to shake Ouija out of its 90 minutes slump, and the unfolding twists that encompass the ghostly secrets of the Zander family just seem fairly standard compared to the innovative spooks of an Insidious, or the laser-focused creeps of a Conjuring. Despite trying to manufacture the occasional jump scare with a yawning mouthed spirit suddenly commandeering the frame, and victims suddenly (and inexplicably) finding their mouths sewn shut before they’re hit with some supernatural whammy, director Stiles White seems completely unable to string together even a basic amount of tension as half of his footage is lit by the glow of LED torches.
Not even the giant, terrified eyes of Olivia Cooke can stop this bungled tale of ghosts, grief and grievously stupid decisions burying itself six feet under at every turn. It’s bad enough when you compare Ouija to other horror films that came out just before, but when you consider that it also arrived just on the cusp of what became known as the “elevated horror” era (The Babadook was released the same year and The VVitch soon followed in 2015), you don’t need to peek give gingerly through the glass of a planchette to see that this film is hopelessly outdated.
Strangely slow for a 90 minute potboiler, Ouija slides itself from ineffective scare, to rushed plotting, to an utter lack of emotion in a few, stiff pushes across the board. Rest assured, if you feel the need to give Ouija a try, a can assure you that any ghosts in the area will swiftly guide that planchette to the section marked “no”. Trust me, you’ll thank them for it.
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