An Average Movie-Goer’s Review
Spoilers! If you don’t want spoilers – check out the Spoiler-Free post
I love horror movies and if I’m going to watch them anyway, why not write an entertaining review from the POV of an average movie-goer and not a professional critic.
Today we’re looking at 2016’s Ouija: Origin of Evil
A widow and her two daughters use an Ouija board to reach out to their father and her husband but while the spirit appears to be him, they might have also unlocked a terrible demonic presence in the home that targets the youngest.
Quick Review:
If the best way to get rid of an Ouija board is to burn it in the fire and the worst way is to just hide it in your closet, this movie is like burning an Ouija board making factory.
Full review at the bottom of the page!
Is Ouija : Origin of Evil Scary?
Watching this alone in the middle of the night will definitely terrify you and if you own a Ouija board, throw that shit out!
Detailed Plot:
The movie starts in Los Angeles ,1967 with Alice (played by Elizabeth Reaser) setting up and performing a séance for some clients; an older man looking to speak to his wife, Mary, and his daughter is a non-believer. The table shakes, a cabinet opens, and a candle goes out. All enough to convince the man his wife is there in the room.
Alice lights three candles telling the man he can ask three questions, the daughter asks what we’re all thinking by questioning ‘why only three?’ Through the questions the man asks, it’s pretty obvious the daughter and her boyfriend are trying to scam the dad out of money but he’s oblivious and wants his dead wife’s opinion.
When he asks his question, a figure appears on the other side of the room and the daughter starts to claim the whole thing is a scam, even if she can’t figure out how Alice is doing it.
The figure screams and appears to attack them but disappears when Alice turns on the lights. The man falls to the ground clutching his chest but recovers. They then leave and Alice refuses payment, telling him to just remember that his wife is at peace.
Alice returns inside and it’s revealed the whole thing is a scam being run by Alice and her two daughters. But, Alice sees it as a way to help people move on and not entirely a scam since she doesn’t try to bleed the clients dry.
The way it works is Alice sits at a mechanical table and is able to trigger the candles to blow out, Doris, her youngest daughter (played by Lulu Wilson) controls the cabinet and table, and her oldest daughter, Paulina (played by Annalise Basso) pretends to be the spirit using shadows.
That night we learn at some point in the past Alice’s husband and father to the girls, Roger, passed away but Doris still prays to him every night waiting for him to one day respond. We also learn the family is now having financial difficulties.
After Alice says goodnight to the girls, Paulina, or Lina for short, sneaks out of the house to hang out with a group of friends, Ellie, Betty, and Mikey at Ellie’s house where her mother has left to play bridge and left the liquor cabinet unlocked. The group find Ellie’s mom’s Ouija board and they decide to play. Before they start, Ellie recites the rules:
- Never Play Alone
- Never Play in a Graveyard
- Always say Goodbye
But I’ve always found the best way to avoid breaking one of these rules and not end up in a horror movie is don’t fucking play.
Betty starts to freak out about it but Lina explains how it actually works; with all four putting their hands on it, they subconsciously move it and are unable to tell which one is doing it making it more believable that it could be a spirit. In reality, this is exactly how Ouija boards work.
But knowing how it works doesn’t help Betty from screaming at the top of her lungs when Ellie’s mother comes home and bust through the door in a funny scene. Alice then has to pack up Doris to pick up Lina and tells her she can smell the alcohol on her breath.
Following the night’s events, Lina tells Alice that they should incorporate Ouija boards into their act. The next day, Alice goes out to buy more candles, sees an Ouija board on sale, and purchases it.
While waiting for Doris to get out of school Alice sees two kids picking on her for having a “witch” mom which is honestly the dumbest thing you can do to a witch’s kid. Before she can intervene, Father Tom (played by Henry Thomas) shows up and tells the kids to leave.
He then consoles Doris telling her the reason people say mean things is because they’re scared. Which means I’m absolutely fucking terrified of the Devil’s Due.
That afternoon Alice paints the bottom of the Ouija board planchette with magnetic paint and attaches magnetic straps to her legs. She then practices by playing the game alone, breaking rule number 1. Unbeknownst to her, all her practice questions are being answered by a spirit, named Marcus, possessing Doris in another room.
Able to move the planchet with her magnets, Alice is satisfied with the test and stops playing but doesn’t say goodbye, breaking rule number 3. Upstairs in the other room, Marcus is no longer answering through Doris and Doris has no recollection of what happened.
That night Alice attempts to call Roger using the Ouija board and asks if he’s there. When the planchet doesn’t move she rolls her eyes and leaves but once she’s gone from the room, it moves to “No”.
A little while later Doris comes down having been told by a spirit to go to the Ouija board. The planchet begins to move on it’s own spelling out “Hi Friend”.
We cut to a quick scene of something pulling at Lina’s blankets until they pull them off completely, waking her up. A classic ghost scare.
A couple of days later, Father Tom asks Alice to come to his office and shows some of Doris’s recent homework with some pretty good cursive. The problem is, Doris doesn’t know cursive so he suspects someone is doing her homework. When asked, Doris states her new friend helped her with it.
Arriving home they find a ‘Notice of Foreclosure’ taped to their door. Doris decides to use the Ouija board to call their dad for help. Once again she uses it alone, breaking the very first rule.
While Lina and Alice are outside talking about their predicament, Doris heads downstairs to the basement and returns with a large wallet full of money. She tells Alice that her father told her where to find it using the Ouija board.
This tells me two things; one, the spirit talking to Doris is pretending to be her father and winning her over by helping them find a sack of money and two, I need to get an Ouija board.
The three use the Ouija board to call out to Roger to see if it really is him or just Doris’s imagination. But Alice and Lina are both shocked when the spirit is able to answer questions only Roger would know.
It’s not clear how the spirit would know the answers since it’s not actually Roger but, if they have been living in that house the entire time it’s possible the spirit has always been around.
Doris looks through the planchette, telling the others that she can sometimes see them through it but, has yet to see Roger and no one asks the question I would be asking, “who the fuck is them?”
That night while Doris is asleep, Alice reveals to Lina that her mother was a fortune teller who could read palms and tarot cards but always thought it was a scam. After seeing Doris able to communicate with spirits she knows think it maybe was real and just skips a generation.
After she leaves, Lina decides to look through the planchette and sees this son of a bitch hiding in the corner, who quickly moves out of sight.
Several days later while at school, Lina makes plans to go to the homecoming dance with a classmate named Mikey, who is about to go for a kiss but is cock-blocked by the holy ghost in the form of Father Tom. Father Tom asks Lina to come to his office where he asks about Doris since she has missed the last 4 days of school. Lina explains that Alice and Doris have been working.
We cut to Alice and Doris with a client using the Ouija board to call upon spirits and even channel their voices through Doris, although Doris begins to get a pain in her neck at the end of one of the sessions.
Later that night the pain intensifies and Lina gives Doris a pill (Tylenol? Aleve? What did they have in the 1960’s?). A little later Doris decides to use the Ouija board to call her father to find out what is happening with her neck but doesn’t get a response. She looks through the planchette and doesn’t see anyone but thinks she sees something out of the corner of her eye.
She takes the planchette to a mirror and looks through it revealing some demon who might be in a gimp suit? Doris screams but the demon shoves it’s arm down her throat, shutting her up, and possessing her.
We next see the possessed Doris whispering something into Lina’s ears while she sleeps and it’s terrifying. Lina then has a nightmare where her mouth becomes sealed shut and her eyes gloss over in a dull white.
The following night Alice heads out to dinner with Father Tom, leaving Lina to watch over Doris. Lina quickly does the teenager thing and invites Mikey over so they can play records in her room.
After some time Mikey kisses Lina goodnight and heads towards the door but stops to say bye to Doris but she startles him when she appears behind him. She asks him if he wants to hear something cool and he obviously says yes because who doesn’t want to hear cool shit all the time? Doris goes into great detail explaining to him just how it feels to be strangled to death which is universally not cool.
That night Lina catches Doris writing on paper without looking and then finds a doll that was a gift from her dad with it’s mouth sewn shut. Lina confronts Doris who tells her she didn’t sew the mouth shut, their father did. This leads to a huge argument between the two and Alice has to intervene but that causes an argument between Lina and Alice.
Lina believes something is wrong with Doris and the thing pretending to be their father is using the same tricks Alice uses on her clients. Alice asks her if that’s true then how did it know personal things and tries to get Lina to understand that something special is going on.
At school the next day, Lina brings some of the papers Doris wrote to Father Tom believing it to be Polish and asks him if anyone at the school could translate. He believes someone may be able to help and she leaves them with him.
Following this, Father Tom stops by the home and asks for a reading but it’s clear he has gotten the papers translated and suspects something. Father Tom, Doris, and Alice sit at the table to start the reading with Father Tom telling them his wife’s name was Gloria. The planchette begins to move on it’s own spelling out “I miss you”.
Father Tom asks what his wife’s middle name was and the planchette spells out Lynn. Satisfied, he begins asking more personal questions about a fight but, Doris tells him Gloria says the fight details aren’t important. She then says Gloria wants him to be happy and not hide behind his collar.
The reading ends and Father Tom tells Alice he also came by because Lina got into some trouble and wants to discuss it with her and Lina in private. The three head upstairs but Father Tom instead asks Lina where Doris wrote out those papers and the three enter the room.
Inside, Father Tom reveals his wife’s middle name was Catherine and Alice begins to think he wants to complain about the reading. Father Tom reveals he tricked Doris by thinking and focusing on the name ‘Lynn’ when he asked about his wife’s middle name. When he asked about the fights he cleared his mind and that prevented whatever thing was being channeled from reading his mind.
He doesn’t think Doris is a fraud but believes whatever she is channeling is much more powerful and dangerous than some spirits.
As he says that we have a jump scare as we switch back to Doris watching tv looking like this.
The doorbell rings and Doris’s face returns to normal as she opens the door to Mikey who is clearly creeped out by Doris. She tells him Lina is currently busy but he can come in and wait. Although he tries to leave, she tells him she wants to show him something cool in the basement and he reluctantly goes down with her. Who doesn’t want to see some cool shit all the- hey wait a second.
We then get an exposition dump courtesy of Father Tom’s explaining what the translated papers say. The papers are actually a journal of a man named Marcus who was in Poland during the war and taken by the Germans. He writes about a doctor nicknamed the “Devil’s Doctor” who used the occult and performed experiments on patients.
After Marcus was rescued by the Allies he came to America but eventually ended up living on the streets and in a mental institution. There he recognized one of the doctor’s was the “Devil’s Doctor” using a new name.
The Devil’s Doctor took him out of the hospital and brought him to his house where he performed experiments in a secret room in the basement. That house is, of course, the current house Alice and girls live in. The journal continues after Marcus’s death where Marcus writes about the evil forces in the home and the things lurking in the dark that aren’t human.
The entire time this is happening scenes of Doris leading Mikey to the basement are spliced in. Doris tells Mikey she thinks there is more money in the basement hole or maybe even jewelry and asks him to reach in and grab it.
For some reason he does this and pulls out the identification papers belonging to various people the Devil’s Doctor killed. Going back in he pulls out a skull. Jumping back, Doris grabs him whispering in his ear causing his eyes to become a pale white.
Lina realizes that if the spirits have been in the house this whole time then they have been watching them and that’s how they knew answers to personal questions about Alice and Roger… also the mind reading? Lina also realizes if they were watching them all these years then they must be watching them now.
The three rush out of the room looking for Doris but upon reaching the bottom of the stairs, they hear thumps coming from upstairs and Mikey falls, hanging himself in front of them with a bedsheet.
The three hear music coming from the basement and together they decide to head down there and put a stop to the demon, as well as burning the Ouija board in the furnace. When they get down there, using a match through the hole in the wall, Father Tom spots multiple skeletons.
Lina says they’ve been playing with the Ouija board in a graveyard meaning they broke rule number 2 but honestly once you have a possessed child and a dead teen in your living room, does it really matter what rule you broke?
Doris calls out for help through a vent that leads to the secret room in the basement and Father Tom elects to go in alone to save her. On the other side he sees Doris but can easily tell she’s not Doris and begins to pray but it’s not enough as she lunges towards him.
On the opposite side Father Tom emerges but he’s revealed to be possessed and chases after Alice and Lina.
Possessed Father Tom chases the girls upstairs and is able to grab Alice but is brought back to his senses before he can stab her. Father Tom pushes Alice outside the basement door and closes it but, just above him, Possessed Doris appears. She screams, launching him down the stairs causing him to break his neck and die.
Doris and Alice attempt to leave the house but the door is sealed shut, even worse, when they look over to the séance room they find the Ouija board still intact. Before they can do anything Alice is launched across the room and knocked out. The dead body of Mikey grabs and throws Lina onto the stairs where Doris is standing, smiling.
Doris crawls along the walls and grabs Lina whispering in her ear. Alice wakes up and rushes over begging the demon possessing Doris to stop and to take her instead. The demon says it will take them all and grabs Alice’s head as we cut to black.
Alice wakes up being dragged to the basement as someone picks up Lina and brings her to her room. She wakes up in time to see a glimpse of her father. It’s revealed her father actually did sew the mouth shut of the doll as he was trying to tell them how to defeat the demon.
Alice wakes up chained to the Devil’s Doctor’s operating table and tries to reach out to Doris. But, Doris reaches out for a knife instead and is about to stab her when Lina knocks her to the ground. Lina grabs a suture from the operating tray, pins Doris down, and starts to sew her mouth shut while the demons attempt to stop her.
Lina is thrown across the room as Doris wakes up, mouth now sewn shut, seemingly confused and having no recollection of the prior events. She then sees her father’s spirit and takes his hand. Alice wakes up and looks over seeing Doris on the ground with her mouth sewn shut. She is then able to pull her hand through the restraints and free herself, rushing over to Doris.
It’s revealed Doris died and the Doris we saw taking her father’s hand was actually her spirit.
Lina wakes up telling Alice she had to sew her mouth shut to stop the voices and then sits next to Alice on the ground. Alice looks over and is shocked to see Lina’s eyes glossed over in a dull white. Possessed Lina stabs Alice in the stomach coming back to her senses right after.
As Alice dies she tells Lina she knows it wasn’t her and that it’s not her fault. She then sees the spirits of Roger and Doris. this tells us she’s definitely dying but will be reunited with the two.
We next see Lina two months later in a mental institution unable to process what’s happened. We learn from a psychiatrist questioning her that Lina has been blamed for the murder of her mother and the body of Doris was never recovered.
Back in her room Lina pulls back the rug, bites her finger hard enough to bleed, creates an Ouija board out of blood, and a planchette out of a pair of eyeglasses. She calls out to Doris but doesn’t get an answer.
Outside of her room the psychiatrist passes by and does a double take when he thinks he sees two people in Lina’s room. But upon double-checking it’s only Lina standing at the door watching him. The film ends with Demon Doris running towards the doctor and we cut to black.
Review
If you’re looking to get scared by a good movie, Ouija: Origin of Evil is definitely the way the go. The film makes you care about the characters through their personalities and lives, making the scares and suspense even more terrifying. The scares don’t feel forced, the character actions makes sense, and story doesn’t feel contrived.
Therefor it wasn’t a surprise when I found out Mike Flanagan directed and co-wrote the film, you’ll also see some familiar faces if you’ve seen other Flanagan stuff like The Haunting of Hill House.
Cast IMBD
Stuff to Ignore
Rotten Tomatoes – 82%
Metacritic – 65