Let's be realistic.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

I thought this movie was really good! it was suspenseful, with a good amount of jump scares. the backstory with the parents was really well done; it was horrifyingly interesting. i personally loved the switching between the past and present during the movie, i think it represented how kaylie and tim's past will never leave them, and it will follow them until their dying day (spoiler alert: it did for kaylie). i'll admit, there were a few plot holes in the movie that could've been fixed, but overall i think it was a job well done. it's not your typical horror movie, but i think it's uniqueness is part of what made it so good. i liked how this movie was able to creep me out, scare me, AND pull at my heartstrings all at the same time. i usually spend horror movies screaming at the screen because the protagonists are idiots, but in oculus i was rooting for them the whole time, and the ending really affected me. there were tears. definitely would recommend!

Huh? Made no sense at all. Good luck trying to figure this one out, especially the end.

As children Tim (Brenton Thwaites) and Kaylie's (Karen Gillan) parents were murdered. Tim was the trigger man who killed his dad, although the kids have a memory of a haunted mirror that controlled their family.Tim has had therapy and wants to move on and "protect his recovery" as he can now finally remember he pulled the trigger. Kaylie is compulsive obsessive and insists the mirror is to blame. She goes to great lengths to set up a controlled experiment to prove the mirror is the culprit. Tim is not eager. They have slightly different memories as to what happened.Their past is presented as a subplot. An hour into the film, you realize that there were things that went on in the household that might be misinterpret by children, yet at the same time there are things going on in the present that don't add up. Is it imagination? Insanity? Supplanted memory? Or is the mirror really haunted?The film combines several old themes to give us something that seems refreshingly new. Well done all the way around. Good horror build up.Parental Guide: Some muttered F-bombs. No sex or nudity.

What scares you most in the horror genre? Masked killers in isolated settings? Booby trapped razor wire rooms? Demon possession? Werewolves? Ghosts? Those are all well and good, but nothing messes my shit up more than psychological uncertainty, the feeling that anything you see might not be real, and the layers of your perception are gradually being fucked with in a subtle way. Such are the terrors that Mike Flanagan's Oculus traffics in, a film that takes postmodern horror expectations and strangles the life out of them in favour of something far more effective. You'll read surface level summaries claiming this to be about a haunted mirror. It...is. Sort of. And it isn't. Then it is again, and before you know it you have no idea what's real and feel like leaving the television and hiding in a back room for fear of an incoming dissociative episode (true story). See, the haunted mirror is just the suggestive tip of a very dense psychological iceberg, a starting point to a narrative that's disturbing in ways that few big budget horror films understand. When an idyllic American family moves into a perfect new house, life seems peachy. Following the arrival of an ornate antique mirror, things take a darker turn. The loving patriarch (Rory Cochrane, exuding natural charisma) turns fiercely psychotic, preying on his doting wife (Katee Sackoff) and terrorizing his son (Garrett Ryan) and daughter (Annalise Basso, terrific in a performance of true hurt and horror). The mirror seems to indeed be the source, but no clear correlation is ever established by the film, only heavy suggestion gnawed at by the notion that the parents may just be irreparably sick in the head, an idea just as, if not more scary than a sentient looking glass. After brutal tragedy, we flash forward a decade or so, the parents are gone and once again the daughter, now played by a dynamite Karen Gillan, tries to get to the source of what happened by locking herself, her brother (Brenton Thwaites, the only weak leak in an otherwise excellent acting ensemble) and that dang pesky mirror in their old house to destroy it. Bring on a panic inducing haunted house of the unconventional variety, one where something, either the mirror or inherited mental illness, plays endless nasty tricks of the mind on both of them until the viewer feels uncomfortable in their own thoughts, the fabric of internal reality ready to disintegrate into shards. Their plight is carefully interspersed (big kudos to Flanagan, serving as his own editor) with flashbacks to the harrowing ordeal they went through as children, as the loving parental unit collapses into madness before their eyes. Listen for a hair raising, subversive score by The Newton Brothers that just adds to the queasy cauldron of unease that this film is. It's more brilliant than any widely released horror film has any right to be these days, a huge step in the right direction for the genre and a waking nightmare for anyone whose worst fear is losing their mind.