Mirrors (2008)
Zombos Says: Good
In a vivid red and brightly gruesome death scene, a woman’s mirror reflection pulls it’s mouth apart while leering at her lying in the bathtub; very, very far apart. As the reflection’s mouth starts ripping into dripping, stringy tissue, so does the real one, sending a shower of blood in every direction. I blinked for a second, wondering whether this was really happening to her or just an illusion, like Ben Carson’s (Kiefer Sutherland) incendiary mirror reflection encounter earlier in the film, which left him unnerved but not scorched. Whatever the smudgy black cloud in the mirror is, it can either make you imagine what it shows you is real, or make its diabolical reflections really happen. This time, her mouth stayed open; wide, wide open.
In director Alexandre Aja’s version of Kim Sung-Ho’s Into the Mirror, the mystery in Mirrors surrounds the bizarre actions of two former security guards making the rounds of a burned-out department store, in New York City (though primarily filmed in Romania), awaiting renovation. Carson is a suspended NYPD detective involved in an accidental shooting, now battling his retreat into a liquor bottle. He takes up the nightly routine to pay the bills, walking through the department store’s charred hallways past the many scorched mannequins and large mirrors reflecting the destruction all around him, with his flashlight barely illuminating the darkness. A palm print on the surface of one squeaky clean mirror peeks his curiosity, and soon a dark force begins to exert its will on him through the glass, showing people in flames and sending him to the flooded basement where the answer to the mystery lies.
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