I had never seen the film Mirrors in its entirety until recently. I’d really only ever seen bits and pieces, most often in the form of clips on YouTube videos listing off some of the worst horror movies of the 2000s. Having finally seen the whole thing for myself, I can see why people think so little of it. That is not to say there is nothing here, because that in itself may be a problem. There were some interesting ideas, but they were squandered in a movie that ultimately feels incomplete.

Pros

Not overly long
Practical effects look good in the one good death scene
Decent idea in the beginning

Cons

Story becomes overly complicated by the end
Overacting and flat acting from the cast
Lots of the usual tropes
CGI effects look terrible
Plot slows to a crawl in the middle
Doesn’t understand setup and payoff
Music is all over the place in some scenes

Plot & Thoughts

Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland) is a former police officer who has just gotten a new job as a security guard at a property that used to be a department store like Macy’s until it burned up in a fire. For some mysterious reason, the owners of the property want it looked after, but there are seemingly no plans to refurbish the place—this reason is never explored further, by the way. Ben is trying to stay sober, having developed a drinking problem after killing someone while on duty. He’s separated from his wife and kids, but he’s trying to get back on track, despite his passive-aggressive and judgmental wife’s efforts to push him away. Unfortunately for him and his mental health, he starts experiencing visions and hauntings at his work and the mirrors are to blame, or so it seems. As the hauntings intensify, Ben sets out to unravel the mystery of the mirrors and quickly finds himself and his family in danger.

Mirrors is one of many horror films of the era that happens to be a remake of a foreign movie from Asia, and it’s pretty obvious. The Ring kicked off the craze in 2001 and was quickly followed by other movies that tried to replicate the formula and success. Mirrors is no different. It uses a format similar to The Ring in having the mystery of the hauntings drive the plot, but it fails to do a lot of what made The Ring work, like establishing rules or answering the important questions. In The Ring, you were cursed if you watched the videotape, and you had seven days to undo the curse or die. In Mirrors, you’re cursed for simply knowing Ben, because he works in the place with the haunted mirrors, and the evil spirit can come for you in your home if you have any reflective surfaces, I guess. One movie has clearly established rules that help progress the plot, gives you a hopeful outcome with a ticking clock, and gives enough clues with the haunted MacGuffin to drive the mystery. The other movie has a mystery without any details, an evil curse that doesn’t seem to have a limit to its power, and no discernable amount of time for the cursed individual to solve the mystery.

It takes little effort or time to list the similarities and how The Ring is much better than Mirrors as a film. The main divergence between the two, however, is in the final act: when the ending of Mirrors goes off the rails and suddenly becomes something like a possession movie. Up until the source of the evil haunting of the mirrors is explained, the mystery—despite its lack of details—is enough to keep you engaged in a way that you might be willing to look past the other flaws of the film. While The Ring explained some of what was going on, there were plenty of other details that it kept a mystery because it either made things more interesting or wasn’t necessary to understand. Mirrors makes the mistake of trying to explain too much to the point that it does not fully make sense and it loses its mystique. In fact, it feels like two completely separate sub-plots from different movies converge in the finale, involving possession, nuns, and demons with stretchy faces.

I’m not going to say that I was invested in the story of Mirrors or its characters, but I was never bored by it. I was mostly perplexed by what was going on and why the characters were so lame. Kiefer Sutherland has only two levels of intensity in his performance: between 1 and 11. He goes between them instantly in numerous scenes; he starts out calm, then explodes like he’s on the set of 24. His wife is passive-aggressive towards him about everything, yet complicit in his growing madness, as though she just wants to do favors for him just so she can have yet something else to hold over his head in her bitchy way.

I was curious as to what the mystery of the Mirrors was and why there was an evil spirit that was capable of ripping the jaws off of people who seemingly had nothing to do with anything. As the movie wrapped up, the mystery was “solved,” and the final scene that thinks it’s paying off some setup it forgot somewhere in the first few acts played with overly dramatic music. Yet, I sat there in a confused and disappointed daze. It was as though the filmmakers had several different scripts for the film they weren’t willing to throw away, so they decided to use all of them to wrap up their story.

TL;DR

Mirrors is yet another movie on the long list of films that came out in what is arguably the worst decade of horror, and it manages to justify said argument in the process. It’s a movie that had potential and could have done something interesting with its material, but ultimately ends up being a little all over the place by the end with characters that are far from compelling. Aside from the death scene of a character in the middle of the movie, Mirrors is very forgettable.

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