Like most recent Hollywood horror films, Alexandre Aja’s Mirrors is based on a successful Asian chiller. In this case, it’s 2003’s Into the Mirror, from director Sung-ho Kim, a little-seen effort from South Korea. They’re digging deeper for the same old content; well, it’s (moderately) better than another Ring or Grudge sequel.
The problem I have with these films is that they’re all so distressingly similar: a vaguely Asian-looking ghost of a young girl, always with long dark hair covering her face, visits our unsuspecting protagonists through some device and kills until the mystery behind her demise is solved and her spirit is put to rest.
Apparently, these ‘grudge’ stories have tradition and a legitimate genre of their own in Asian cultures, but once American-ized they all come off as carbon copies of one another; Gore Verbinski’s The Ring was a truly scary ride (and topped the Japanese original, in my opinion) but each successive J-horror remake has been stillborn, with nothing new to offer.
Mirrors is the 4th such film I’ve seen in 2008 alone, following The Eye, Shutter, and One Missed Call. It’s easily the best, but that’s no praise. While director Aja manages to create a modestly creepy atmosphere in the film, it’s all for naught by the preposterous, fiery action-movie climax.
24‘s Kiefer Sutherland stars as ex-cop Ben Carson, estranged from his wife (Paula Patton) and children and living with his sister (Amy Smart) after killing a man on the job, getting dismissed from the force and turning to alcohol.
On the rebound, he gets a job as a night watchman at a decrepit, burned-down department store with giant, pristine mirrors, kept in good condition by the last night watchman (Jason Flemyng), who slits his own throat with shards of a mirror in a pre-credits sequence.
Soon Ben is seeing things in the mirrors that shouldn’t be there, a door opening here or a dead body there, fire that doesn’t exist but still burns. The mirror beings are trying to tell him something of course, but they like to be cryptic enough to pad out the film to an overlong 110 minutes, and put some pressure on Ben to solve the mystery by killing those close to him.
So soon it’s a (yawn) race against time to put the spirits at rest before they can kill his family.
Early scenes feature almost nothing but Sutherland walking around the deserted, burned-out department store, and for half an hour, the film manages to create a creepy, almost chilling vibe.
After that the routine plot kicks in, and turns the movie into a boring, preposterous mess, with no apparent rules: the mirrors can, apparently, create an invisible double of yourself that attacks in the real world, or possess your real-world soul, or harm your mirror image, which in turn harms you, or…
And it’s not just mirrors, but anything that reflects, like a pool of water or a shiny door knob, but, I guess, not human eyes. The preposterous logic of the film simply follows whatever might look ‘cool’ on the screen, with no regard for making any kind of sense within its own world.
Poor CGI also helps to sink the enterprise, particularly in the movie’s showstopper, a nasty jaw-ripping scene that ultimately comes off as cartoonish.
Had it been any more realistic, though, it would have earned the film harsher ratings. This isn’t a PG-13-friendly flick like most other entries in the genre; some of the violence is as harsh as Aja’s ultra-gory Haute Tension.
