8/10? Wtf?

I agree that it was awful. Overuse of cgi glowing eyes. A retarded plot with unlikable characters. Evil wins, again! Soooooooooo Original. The horror genre is dead.

That too dark complaint is b.s. I watched the film on an iphone and I could see what was happening very clearly.

Yep... Blame the movie for your TV brightness settings and your inability to follow a plot.

The new home of Welcome to Planet Bob: http://kingofbob.blogspot.ca/

I would tend to agree. Not for the same reasons, I didn't find it confusing, just......crap. So many modern horror movies go for what is most disturbing and shocking, and not trying to tell an actual good story. What even defined what "horror" is anymore, has been blurring, and shock has come to rule the genre.

I think the kids' acting, all things considered, was solid. But the plot in general, and what the story did to the family, was just not entertaining. It wasn't creepy, it was just uncomfortable to watch, especially with the mother. These modern horrors so often go for this sense of total desolation, and that in no way is what makes something a "horror" film. A horror film at least in the classical sense, is something that is supposed to chill you, creep you out, it isn't required to have a "darker than noir" plotline, where no one lives, or everything is ruined in the end. No, not all movies need a "happy" ending by far. But I personally find nothing at all entertaining about showing a perfectly normal, happy family getting destroyed like that.

Beyond my personal issues with the concepts of the movie, and what it actually showed......it just wasn't that good overall. The adult acting was not great, the dialogue was often terrible, and the execution of everything was just fairly weak. Like I said, it went for shock value over trying to tell a compelling story, and this story is in no way compelling. To me, it did what a majority of modern horror films tend to do, which is they take some nugget of an interesting concept, such as a cursed mirror that makes you see illusions (which is an interesting premise), but then they do nothing terribly interesting with it. Like I said, they fail to tell a strong story, with strong characters. Instead, they fall upon the same old tropes, and rely on both the audiences lack of attention, and the characters' (as written) sheer stupidity.

You should not have a horror film where the only reason people die is because they literally make all of the dumbest choices possible. To me, that is just lazy writing. And in general, I feel like a lot of modern horror filmmakers, beyond just going for shock value and trying to gross out or disturb the audience, just tend to often a lack of class or taste in their storytelling.

I suppose we could all benefit from this thought out critique and go back to watching Polterge-, I mean, Insidious. Or we could just wait patiently for Paranormal Activity 9 because the world hasn't had enough jump scares and rearranged furniture. Would you like to know why this film did better than you expected it to? Because it was a beautifully shot, intelligent film that breaks down into metaphors and makes the viewer ask questions when it's done. Was it real? Was it in his head? I mean, the guy explains the entire plot to his sister as she is explaining the point of the room.

It was meant to confuse the viewer. Was the ending predictable? Sure, but what did you expect, a happy ending? It's horror. The reason films like this exist and why they do so well is because people like me don't want to watch millennial horror films built around social media where no one is smart enough to bother asking why there are 100+ found footage films and not one person seems to mind that the on-screen world is apparently made up of documentary film students with trust funds. I graduated from a prestigious film school. Guess what? I don't walk around with my camera out 24 hours a day because who does that? But the difference between us is that you apparently need someone to hold your hand and explain the entire film to you because anything more than that is too taxing on the brain. If it wasn't your thing, fine. Move on to the next thing, but to say it doesn't deserve the rating it has because you couldn't follow it isn't the films fault. This film won numerous awards in some very high honor festivals. Are they wrong too? Have we really come to a point in society where intelligent films are seen as "crap" and actual crap is seen as ground breaking? Because that's what's happening. We have terrible writers who churn out terrible books that get turned into terrible films (I'm looking at you, Twilight) and somehow, they are revered by the same people who take one look at this film and cry about how awful it is. It pisses me off, honestly, as a filmmaker, because I know at some point I'll have to make something that will make me feel dirty, ashamed and embarrassed to talk about because the film I actually WANT to make will be looked down on by today's generation of lazy filmgoers as "slow" or "confusing" and because they can't follow along with a complex storyline, it will wind up on some internet forum where people with no idea what goes into making a film will trash talk it without actually explaining what it is about the film they don't like outside of they just didn't get it. I would love to see what people like yourself would have to say about anything made by David Lynch, who incidentally, is a very well loved auteur that actors will forego pay to work with. If this film confused you, go watch anything by Lynch and then come back here and tell us all why his films don't deserve their 7+/10 ratings.

I gave it 10/10. The people looking at the reviews for this one aren't looking for Citizen Kane, they're looking for horror/suspense.
In that category, I'd rank this alongside The Ring and The Shining.