Told you milk, the filters heavily add to the realism. The filters hide the CGI giveaways and the brain fills in the blanks. Perfect match.
Yes, bravo, you nailed it. The problem is that we have cinematically formatted brains. Even Kojima, his twitter description is: "70% of my body is made of movies." no wonder his VR-ish first demo is a ~70% cinematic one. For him (for his brain), movies are really a realistic medium.
It's like 30fps versus 60fps, many people who tried TLOU at 60fps can't now go back to 30fps, even if they always thought that 30fps was more "realistic" in a way they couldn't really explain, for their 30fps accustomed brains. And here I am talking about some ND staff!
In the near future age of VR (Morpheus and Oculus), the first dev who'll have the crazy idea of doing a creepy P.T.-ish game with a fully realistic way, Oh boy, people will really, really be scared, it'll be like the revolution in scary videogames and nobody (or just a few nostalgic) will ever try only cinematic creepy games, at least in VR.
Mark my words!