Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Blistering performances.

A mirror with evil powers and two siblings who want to destroy it - Oculus is for sure not inventing the wheel new, but a good and suspenseful atmosphere, good acting and a pro production make the flick an entertaining contribution to the genre and it is far better than the average movie that hits the market under the label of horror.

I appreciate a movie that isn't entirely straightforward, and that has me questioning what's happening almost from the beginning. "Oculus" managed to do that. Was any of this real, or was it a figment of someone's (presumably Kaylie's) imagination? Was there anything supernatural about what happened, or was it just a family tragedy? Did the whole family go insane, or was it only one or two of them? I wondered about all of those questions as the movie went on, and in the end there didn't seem to be any specific answer given to those questions.The movie begins with Tim (Brenton Thwaites) being released from a mental institution. He's met by his sister Kaylie (Karen Gillan). The two share a bond that goes beyond just being brother and sister. They both experienced something horrific. It's made clear pretty early that dad killed mom, and then Tim killed dad. But why? What happened that turned a normal and apparently loving family so bloody? Kaylie can't accept the possibility that it's just a case of straighforward killing. Instead, she's convinced that it's because of an antique mirror that had been in the family home. She's traced its history - there have been other similar incidents. She believes there's an evil, supernatural presence in the mirror and she wants Tim to help her kill it once he's out. Tim on the other hand is convinced after his years in therapy that there was nothing supernatural about what happened. Dad killed mom and he killed dad. It was that simple. And then we watch as Kaylie's carefully planned experiment sets out to prove that the mirror is haunted - or something.Thwaites and Gillan were good in this, as were Rory Cochrane and Katee Sackhoff as their parents. The movie switches back and forth from the present to the past - and while such a format can sometimes be difficult to follow, I thought it worked very well here. It allowed the story to unfold methodically. Everything that Kaylie was planning in the present seemed to have some relationship to the past, so letting the past out bit by bit was an effective way of moving the story forward. There are the kinds of shocking things you would expect in this kind of movie, but it's not an especially blood and gore kind of thriller. It is thoughtful and it does make you wonder - and it leaves you wondering. Was this mirror haunted or not, or was this just Kaylie not being able to accept the brutal reality of what actually happened? It's left to the viewer to decide. (8/10)

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.

The acting was fine but I was disappointed by this movie. It wasn't that bad, and the filming, sounds and flash backs were actually great, nevertheless, the ending reeally disappoined me. It could have been so much better, like, the sister could have been the one imagining all this, and we'd have seen her inside an asylm at the end, having gone crazy after trying to "kill" the mirror, or even since she was a child, no having been able to cope with her whole family's death, imagining her brother actually being still alove nowdays... And so forth, the possibilities are endless, but dying like this? Too easy for a movie that was kinda good up unti the end.I wish we'd been given more details about the why's and how's of the mirror's killings, origins (I mean the occult origins, not the historical ones that were pretty much given to us in one go at the beginning of the movie) It was sometimes too fast paced and sometimes the total opposite.As I said, It definitely could have been much better since the actors were pretty good and the scenario was a good one. Oh and to the people wondering who the "lady from the office" was, it's simply an illusion / ghost of the woman who died years prior due to a miscarriage/botched abortion, she's briefly mentionned at the beginning in the list of casualties caused by the mirror.