Alexadre Aja, the man behind the intensely creepy 2003 film High Tension and the intensely crappy 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes has now brought us something in between. Kiefer Sutherland adds credibility to the otherwise unoriginal horror film Mirrors, about an exiled New York City cop who soon finds himself battling a mysterious force hidden behind every reflective surface that is endangering his sanity, his life, and the lives of his family.
The movie opens with a terrified night watchman running for his life. From what, we don't know, until he begs forgiveness from a mirror for trying to escape. The mirror cracks angrily in response.
There is a strange force in Mirrors that is able to torment members of the living, or members of the three dimensional, or members of whatever land the mirror-forces are unable to occupy. It is at least an hour and a half into the movie before we learn much of anything about the deadly force that is tormenting Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland), and that's more than a little too long.
Ben Carson has recently been put on mandatory leave from the New York police department after a tragic shooting, and his life is increasingly spiraling out of control. Not the least of his worries is the strange fact that the only job he is able to get is as a night watchman, a caretaker, if you will, of a department store that burned down five years earlier.
I'm a little confused about that whole setup, by the way. The building is standing but is nothing more than a skeleton of its former self, and is clearly beyond repair. What is a nightly caretaker meant to do? Upkeep is obviously unimportant. Are they worried about teenagers or homeless people wandering in? Isn't that a job that, say, a good fence can do?
It's definitely the worst job ever, but it's a great setup for a horror movie. A guy under tremendous pressure is forced to take a job where he has to wander through an enormous, burned building every hour or so in the middle of the night. Personally I would walk off the job and quit as soon as the mirrors showed me on fire, but not Ben Carson. He didn't start browsing the classifieds even when he learned that his predecessor suffered a mysterious death involving mirrors. This guy has balls of solid rock!
Complicating the matters of Ben's unraveling professional life is the fact that his wife doesn't want him coming over to see his kids without calling first, he's an alcoholic, and his sister, who is providing him with a sofa to sleep on, is a bartender. This guy needed professional help before the mirrors started talking to him!
The scenes inside the derelict department store are actually pretty effective, but it becomes clear very early on that far too much stock is put into the scares of his nightly walk-throughs and not nearly enough put into developing a real story. There's a story, of course, it's just that the movie feels like a lot of Funland Haunted House tours intermixed with an occasional break to explain a few things, and then back to the haunted house.
A good horror movie will either make you fear something that previously seemed harmless (like the dark or hallways or dolls or children or the like), or instill in you the fear or interest that there might be something more going on right under our very noses. Mirrors attempts to do both - to make us fear not only mirrors but all reflective surfaces, which are all dangerous in the movie, and also to suggest that there is a whole other world going on behind those mirrors, that those pesky handprints that won't wipe off are really someone on the other side with their hand on the glass.
I doubt that the movie will succeed in making many people afraid of mirrors, although it did have a fair amount of good scares and a genuine feeling of tension when it was supposed to. Naysayers will balk at the idea of paying real money to watch Jack Bauer scream at his reflection for two hours, but even though this is basically a strange combination of several previous movies and there's not much original going on, you could definitely do worse. It's a major improvement on the horror movies that we've seen released in the last ten years or so. I had started to lose faith completely in the entire genre. Mirrors is not going to save the horror genre from being sacrificed to the box office gods, but I'm happy every time I see a scary movie these days that doesn't star a lot of sorority girls in halter tops and idiot pretty boys.
But for all of it's weaknesses, as a creepy horror film it's hard to say that Mirrors isn't successful. It might even be a pretty good date movie, although there are dozens better that you could watch at home. But the ending, I don't mind telling you, is better than everything else in the movie, and it's almost worth going to see it just for the last five minutes. Horror fans, if nothing else, will enjoy picking out the homages
The movie opens with a terrified night watchman running for his life. From what, we don't know, until he begs forgiveness from a mirror for trying to escape. The mirror cracks angrily in response.
There is a strange force in Mirrors that is able to torment members of the living, or members of the three dimensional, or members of whatever land the mirror-forces are unable to occupy. It is at least an hour and a half into the movie before we learn much of anything about the deadly force that is tormenting Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland), and that's more than a little too long.
Ben Carson has recently been put on mandatory leave from the New York police department after a tragic shooting, and his life is increasingly spiraling out of control. Not the least of his worries is the strange fact that the only job he is able to get is as a night watchman, a caretaker, if you will, of a department store that burned down five years earlier.
I'm a little confused about that whole setup, by the way. The building is standing but is nothing more than a skeleton of its former self, and is clearly beyond repair. What is a nightly caretaker meant to do? Upkeep is obviously unimportant. Are they worried about teenagers or homeless people wandering in? Isn't that a job that, say, a good fence can do?
It's definitely the worst job ever, but it's a great setup for a horror movie. A guy under tremendous pressure is forced to take a job where he has to wander through an enormous, burned building every hour or so in the middle of the night. Personally I would walk off the job and quit as soon as the mirrors showed me on fire, but not Ben Carson. He didn't start browsing the classifieds even when he learned that his predecessor suffered a mysterious death involving mirrors. This guy has balls of solid rock!
Complicating the matters of Ben's unraveling professional life is the fact that his wife doesn't want him coming over to see his kids without calling first, he's an alcoholic, and his sister, who is providing him with a sofa to sleep on, is a bartender. This guy needed professional help before the mirrors started talking to him!
The scenes inside the derelict department store are actually pretty effective, but it becomes clear very early on that far too much stock is put into the scares of his nightly walk-throughs and not nearly enough put into developing a real story. There's a story, of course, it's just that the movie feels like a lot of Funland Haunted House tours intermixed with an occasional break to explain a few things, and then back to the haunted house.
A good horror movie will either make you fear something that previously seemed harmless (like the dark or hallways or dolls or children or the like), or instill in you the fear or interest that there might be something more going on right under our very noses. Mirrors attempts to do both - to make us fear not only mirrors but all reflective surfaces, which are all dangerous in the movie, and also to suggest that there is a whole other world going on behind those mirrors, that those pesky handprints that won't wipe off are really someone on the other side with their hand on the glass.
I doubt that the movie will succeed in making many people afraid of mirrors, although it did have a fair amount of good scares and a genuine feeling of tension when it was supposed to. Naysayers will balk at the idea of paying real money to watch Jack Bauer scream at his reflection for two hours, but even though this is basically a strange combination of several previous movies and there's not much original going on, you could definitely do worse. It's a major improvement on the horror movies that we've seen released in the last ten years or so. I had started to lose faith completely in the entire genre. Mirrors is not going to save the horror genre from being sacrificed to the box office gods, but I'm happy every time I see a scary movie these days that doesn't star a lot of sorority girls in halter tops and idiot pretty boys.
But for all of it's weaknesses, as a creepy horror film it's hard to say that Mirrors isn't successful. It might even be a pretty good date movie, although there are dozens better that you could watch at home. But the ending, I don't mind telling you, is better than everything else in the movie, and it's almost worth going to see it just for the last five minutes. Horror fans, if nothing else, will enjoy picking out the homages