Mirrors

WARNING: This review is hidden because it reveals the content of the film.
Click here to show this review. “Mirrors” is an attempt at an American remake of a Korean horror film and it just doesn’t translate. Even if you’re not familiar with the original story, there are constant inconsistencies present and a climax that shatters the film like a tea cup thrown out onto the pavement. The premise is that an ex-police officer (Kiefer Sutherland as Ben) that is down on his luck is hired as a night guard at an abandoned shopping center. There he begins seeing strange images inside the mirrors of the building. They turn out to be far more than just hallucinations; they’re deadly. If he wants these horrifying images to stop and his family to be safe he will have to solve a good ol’ fashioned horror-ghost mystery.

If you’re a fan of what I call “J-Horror” films, you will see an overall story that’s pretty familiar. You expect the movie to set up some terrifying visions, a quest for the hero, a couple of deaths here and there and a terrifying mystery in the end. The trick will be to get to the bottom of the catastrophe while avoiding any mirror surfaces, which are conduits for the ghostly forces. Trouble begins when The rules set up early in the movie keep getting broken. The further you get in, the more it becomes both confusing and frustrating. For example, the main way that mirrors kill people in the film is by having the reflections act on their own and force people to commit suicide (it’s odd, but that’s the general idea) Towards the climax of the film this changes completely. Sometimes reflections attack other people or appear without the person who created them being in the room. The reflections feel more like evil ghost duplicates than actual evil versions of themselves that are trapped in reflective surfaces. There are even some scenes where people are being attacked without any reflection present, so in the end you just give up trying to understand what’s going on with the movie. Another inconsistency is in the sounds. Most of the time, the mirrors don’t make any noise. That makes sense because they’re just images reflected that gain the supernatural ability to influence people instead of the other way around. Once again towards the end of the film you hear some reflections making noises and talking and it doesn’t make any sense. In theory it would work because just when you think your character is safe, suddenly he or she will be in mortal peril, but in practice it just feels like the script was quickly written with additional scares thrown in without anyone taking a second look at them to see if they worked with the film’s pre-established rules.

Another big flaw in the film is that it isn’t very frightening. You’ll be jumping out of your seat plenty, but that’s because the movie uses cheap tactics to startle you. If it isn’t a quick flash of a grotesque mutilated body accompanied by a music sting, it’s a sudden flapping of bird wings or a door slamming. The movie has some genuinely creepy looking sets and some unsettling scenes but instead of building suspense and letting the chills slowly come to you as you start playing with possible scenarios in your head, it just interrupts itself with these cheap sound cues and loud noises. It’s a shame because the movie actually starts off pretty creepy. You have this really big derelict shopping center that was the setting for a big tragedy and our main character is stuck there for hours by himself in the dark. There are creepy burnt manikins, perfect for setting up an unsuspecting sneak onto Ben... but it just drops that entirely by making the bulk of the film set in a series of different location. It doesn’t help that the characters in the movie make the same mistakes as every other character that sees ghosts and is forced to solve a supernatural mystery. Ben acts erratically, breaking mirrors and painting over them without giving any explanations to the people around him and he doesn’t ever try to collect evidence that there are weird things going on. He never tries to convince the people he is trying to protect that he isn’t crazy, just so we can have the scene where he gets into a fight with the people that don’t believe him.

Then, we get to that ending. This is A MINOR SPOILER, but we’re basically told that long ago the problem of the ghosts/mirrors/demonic creatures was tackled by exorcists and priests and that they had no success in taming this threat. This information is not only inconsistent with the end of the movie, but it makes the behaviour of the characters in the film totally unexplainable. The ridiculous reason for the mirrors being dangerous is nothing compared to the climax of the film, which is taken from a totally different genre and is downright silly. It would be wrong to spoil exactly what happens in the scenes right before the very end of the movie but if you see this confrontation you’ll be shaking your head in embarrassment.

The movie isn’t a complete disaster but there are points where you can totally tell that the original story just wouldn’t translate into a North American setting and nobody knew what to do. Solution? Pick something at random from another horror movie and fill in the gaps. It ends up playing like a terrible Asian ghost movie and a terrible American haunted house story mashed together and coarsely stitched so it would stay in place just long enough for the film to conclude. If the concept of “Mirrors” sounds interesting to you, track down the original source material, or just grab a good Asian horror film. Don’t bother sitting through this 111 minute train wreck because you’ll be really frustrated as everything that looked promising at first falls flat on its face. (Dvd, April 11, 2013)