Fear the mirror…or don’t, whatever.
Image courtesy of Yahoo Movies
Director: Alexandre Aja
Notable Cast: Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Cameron Boyce, Erica Gluck, Amy Smart, Mary Beth Peil
There is a huge difference between a film that is incomprehensible because the plot is hard to follow and a film that is confusing because everyone involved is indifferent to the outcome. But if ever a movie tries to bridge that gap, it is Mirrors. It is apparent that writers Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur are working backwards from their decently clever one-off closing concept. But much like tracing a conversation back to its starting point, Mirrors unfolds in a surprisingly convoluted way. Once the audience gets to the “why” of it all, we are not even sure what the question was in the first place.
It doesn’t help that the stories have no connection whatsoever. Sometimes plots that unfold due to happenstance are a welcome change of pace, but in a horror movie called Mirrors starring Kiefer Sutherland the mirrors darn well better have a reason to be terrorizing Kiefer Sutherland. Oh, but once you ask that first “why” you will be sorry you did. Suffice it to say the shortest distance from A to B is most definitely not a straight line.
Mirrors begins with a night watchmen fleeing from, you guessed it, mirrors. After his demise Sutherland’s suspended detective is introduced waking up at his sister’s (Amy Smart) place. After shooting a fellow officer while undercover, Sutherland’s wife (Paula Patton) kicked him out of the house as his depression and drinking to cope were having an ill effect on their children.
So right off we are led to care very deeply for the sad-sack, manic cop and his incredibly compassionate wife. Thus, when Sutherland gets a job as a night security guard at a burnt out shell of a department store, the audience will rejoice that the hero is getting his life back on track. (Sidebar: While it would be impossible to point out every logic flaw in Mirrors, I feel it is important to note how ridiculous it is to think the city of New York would waste money having a perfectly good property—on 6th Avenue, no less—monitored 24 hours a day rather than find a party interested in rebuilding it.) But Sutherland starts seeing haunting images in the well-kept mirrors of the former Mayflower.
Stupidly, Sutherland returns night after night to his job in an attempt to investigate what is happening. It seems the building has some sort of curse tracing back into the 1950’s when the structure used to be home to a mental ward. The mystery is solved in a way only seen in cinema, and for a suspended cop-killer Sutherland has a surprising amount of carte blanche investigating the non-case. It makes one wonder why, if there are so many documents about the former department store and mental ward, no one else seems to know anything about it.
Typically, Sutherland is the only person who knows the truth other than the random character that pops up as the plot necessitates her to do so. Ironically, the only truly logical thing in the entire movie is that no one believes Sutherland at all. By the time anyone does believe him there should not be anyone left in the audience that cares. The story is so convoluted that by the time Smart’s reflection tears off her jaw Mirrors has already become self-parody.
Even if you wanted to keep up with the goings-on (which you shouldn’t) there would be no way to because things just randomly happen and their relevance remains unclear until the story has already moved on to some new idea. Granted there are some decent ideas swimming in the cesspool that is Mirrors, there are not enough to justify waiting two hours for director Alexandre Aja to show off his wacky backwards film. If things are worse on the other side of the mirror, I feel bad for my reflection who had to suffer through srorriM.
