Headscratchers / Oculus

• Why didn't Kaylie, concerned if she had actually just killed her fiancé, look to see if his car was there when they were outside?
  • Given the amount of Mind Screw going on here, they may never have been outside at all. And even if they were, the mirror could have hidden the car. Or given them the illusion of it being there.
• Why was Tim convicted for the death of his father? One would think that would be a fairly standard case of self-defense (his father was clearly insane and Tim believed his and Kaylie's lives were in imminent danger). Him screaming about how the mirror did it shouldn't change that.
  • "It was self defense your honor. The magic mirror turned my father evil so I had to kill him."
  • Given that the story he believes is based on defense, they probably believed he acted in self defense, but held him since he probably kept going on about an evil mirror. His sister didn't get that treatment since she hadn't killed anyone (or she just kept her mouth shut about the mirror).
  • This would get fairly complicated. Technically, if he was an adult, they couldn't lock him up unless they could prove he was a danger to himself or others, no matter what he believed (otherwise there would be no way to distinguish between "crazy," "believes unpopular ideas," or even just "member of an unpopular religion"). It was clear his father was a danger to him, but it was not clear whether or not the "evil mirror" fantasy could recur about a person who WASN'T a danger to him. He would probably have had a better chance of getting off if he was an adult, but with both his parents dead that made him and his sister wards of the State, which likely took a lot of debate out of it.
  • You forget there is no actual evidence of any wrongdoing from the father's side. All anyone on the outside knew was that the mother was sick, and the deaths of the parents was by the gun, which only has the father's prints, which him being the owner makes sense, and the son's, whom they found having shot the father. All available evidence points to a deeply disturbed child having killed his parents and then blaming it on an imaginary friend. The only evidence that the father had done anything wrong would be the chain in the parents' bedroom, but that's IF any of that stuff happened at all, and wasn't just imagined by the main characters as a psychological response to their parents' marriage problems.
    • However, when a child goes to a neighbor and says "something is wrong, I need help", for that neighbor to blindly accept the supposed "wrong-doer's" claims is problematic. At a minimum, a single police officer ought to have been sent to check on the possibility of "domestic abuse". And while a 'disturbed child' might very well be imagining something more gruesome than reality, but something must have caused the child to be so disturbed as to have such a gruesome imagination in the first place. Further, the mother being "sick" either mentally or physically wouldn't have explained her physical state. If she ate plates and was restrained by a chain then there would be bruises and injuries that cannot be caused by a gun and so would place fault on her husband. If she was mentally hysteric or insane, then she should have been brought to a therapist and her not being brought to a therapist puts fault on her husband. Etc.
      • The entire point of the movie is that the mirror can totally alter anybody's perceptions and memories, and they aren't even aware of it. So the easy answer is that there never WAS a visit by the neighbor to begin with, Kaylie never actually called anybody or went and got the neighbor, and the 'visit' was just the mirror further screwing with the kids by giving them a hope spot before having the fake neighbor leave without helping.
    • Presumably the neighbor's reaction (or lack thereof) was influenced by the mirror.
    • It would seem that it was proven that the father killed and tortured the mother, because Kaylie wants to clear his name. However, Tim was presumably put in a hospital not for the self-defense killing, but for sticking to the mirror theory and/or for being too traumatized. A better question would why Kaylie didn't receive professional help after what she lived through.
    • The father would have had gunshot residue on his sleeves from shooting the wife, and both he and the mother would likely have left bruises on Kaylie's throat. Those bruises would be larger than Tim's hands, and he was smaller than she. There would be evidence that an adult strangled her, and that the father shot the gun.
• Can the mirror actually change what the cameras capture? It's implied that some of the things seen on the cameras didn't happen, but if they were brought outside the mirror's sphere of influence, would they show what actually happened? While this might not prove that the mirror did everything, it would show that the anchor was an automated system, and so not something Tim could control.
  • Throughout the entire movie, the cameras had an objective view regardless of the illusions. And Tim forced the kitchen timer to reach zero and swing the beam.
  • This was arguably another example of the main characters' Idiot Ball. Even if it can't change what the cameras see, it can change what they see when they look at the monitors.
  • That's sort of the entire point. The cameras have an objective view of the events, but the mirror can influence Tim and Kaylie to move the cameras and change the appearance of anything they see with their own eyes.
• Why did Kaylie think that she could treat the mirror like something to be studied and then destroyed? Given that it was pretty clearly an intelligent being, of course it wouldn't let them know how far its influence could extend, and would only kill plants as far as it wanted them to think it could reach. Beyond that, it seems to have some (at least minimal) ability to interfere with mechanical devices since it stops a gun from firing when it's pointed toward it. If it can pull that off, couldn't it just reset the alarm on its own? At no point after bringing the mirror back into their lives do the protagonists have a chance at survival.
  • I think Kaylie's hubris in believing she could understand and control the situation was the whole point.
  • She's obsessed and traumatized, basically. She puts a ridiculous amount of effort into identifying a set of rules that the mirror must obey and limitations it must operate under because she wants to believe she can defeat it. It's the same shitty logic that makes people tell rape victims that they wouldn't have gotten raped if they wore modest clothing and didn't drink; they want to believe that there is a "correct" way to behave because it justifies any negative outcomes as being a punishment for misbehaving, and thus presents an illusion of control. Tim basically tells her in the first few scenes that she's cherry picking her research for bits that support her theory, and that's exactly what she's doing, just not in the way he thinks. She's cherry picking her research for bits that support the theory that the mirror has any limits to begin with.
  • ^This. The movie is very clearly a spiritual descendant of the grandest Lovecraftian horror, in which humans falsely believe that they have more control over the events transpiring around them than they actually do. The basic Lovecraftian protagonist is a prideful character who walks into a supernatural situation thinking "I'll be fine, I'll be fine. . . Oh, Crap! Oh, Crap! Oh, Crap!." Kaylie didn't just want to destroy the mirror, she wanted to prove it was home to a supernatural force, because that meant that her father wasn't an evil sadistic bastard who tortured and murdered her mother and that her brother wasn't a crazy kid who killed his dad in probable self-defense. And of course, once the plan got more elaborate than "destroy the mirror" the protagonists were screwed.
• I'll just ask a simple question: Why didn't the sister just smash the damn mirror?
  • Well that one’s easy....because then the movie would only be 15 minutes long.
  • She didn’t *want* to just destroy the mirror. She wanted to exonerate her family first.
  • She knew about the guy who tried to smash the mirror and wound up walking into traffic and killing himself.
  • The only way that might be possible is to destroy it by gunshot from outside its range of influence. The only chance she had was in the basement of the auction house. However, the first time she came close enough to confirm that it was the actual mirror, she was lost.
  • The mirror has safeguards to defend itself. Also, the siblings did try to smash it when they were younger and they failed
• Why did the police responding to the first tragedy completely ignore the parents' self-inflicted injuries and the chains installed in the parents' bedroom? People here are saying that Tim was sectioned originally for supposedly murdering his parents, but did the police also somehow think he chained his mother to the wall in the bedroom for a week and forced her to eat cutlery? And the father just let him do that and never called or asked for help? When the cops show up the second time they even have the video evidence from both siblings showing what they were trying to do...it seems kind of bizarre they wouldn't believe the mirror is haunted, even if it manages to start influencing them too.
  • The movie does not make clear what actual evidence there was available to the police; the mirror is shown to induce delusions in people. There have also been many real life examples of rational people explaining away irrational events.
  • The dad did try to call for help. There is one scene in the movie when the father comes home and the mother has had a psychotic break. He tries to call for help but he hangs up when he heard voices (the mirror influenced him)