Mirrors - ‘Jane Eyre’ meets the Exorcist with mirrors

10/10/2008

Alexandre Aja rose to fame with his 2004 adaptation of Wes Craven’s 1977 horror movie, the Hills Have Eyes, and Aja tripled the gore and torture. He does the same for Sung-ho Kim’s Korean horror movie Into the Mirror. This adaptation starts out faithful to the original and with promise. The theme is something cerebral for a slasher: that mirrors (although Aja extends this to all reflective surfaces) are gateways between evil forces behind them and the person looking into them. Unfortunately, the promise isn’t realised.

The film begins dramatically enough: a man is chased by an unseen stalker into a mirrored locker room where he pleads unintelligibly and then watches as his mirror image slits his very real throat. Cut to Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland), a cop who retired early from the NYPD after the death of his partner. Carson takes a job as a security guard on the night shift in an old department store that had a fire in the 1950s and was never rebuilt. Carson soon discovers things are not right in that derelict building and the deeper his investigations go, the more he places himself and his family in danger.

 

Carson has a further problem: given his volatile personality and erratic behaviour after the death of his partner, no one, no even his estranged wife, believes him.

Sutherland looks like a cop and one can imagine him taking a security job and moving in with his sympathetic sister (Amy Smart) while recovering and contemplating his next move.  We feel his frustration – with himself and others – to the point that he starts to accept that the happenings in the department store might be a figment of his troubled imagination.

Despite running the emotional gamut, however, the script does Sutherland no favours. The story takes too long to develop and when it does, it becomes increasingly ridiculous. In the original, the police force get involved in the investigation from the outset and a nasty cop on the force capitalizes on his rival’s guilt over his partner’s death. In this remake, the police are conspicuously absent and Carson’s only friend on the force seems remarkably blasé as the evidence piles up.

 

When Carson’s sister is brutally murdered, can America’s finest really think it’s a coincidence?  The film descends into slapstick when Carson kidnaps a nun at gunpoint and then emerges ‘alive’ after a building explodes on top of him.  There are a few scary moments and some atmospheric visuals, but the long set piece where Amy Carson (Paul Patton) is left alone in her house with her two children and a lot of angry mirrors becomes more tedious than suspenseful.

Aja is exploiting the mythology, folklore and religious tradition of mirrors to lend credibility to his premise.  That might have worked, except that the investigation leads to a schizophrenic woman who had been in a mental hospital at the time of the fire.

 

In the end, this is the ‘Jane Eyre’ meets the Exorcist with mirrors. Aja strains to explain the relevance of his theme: “Everyone has a relationship with their reflection. It’s something we don’t really think about, but it’s there.’  Even if you swallow that one, if you’re estranged from your reflection, Mirrors is not the sort of movie that will have you running to renew the acquaintance.


Joyce Glasser, October 8 2008