I had fairly high hopes for Mirrors, a semi-remake of a Korean horror movie I haven’t seen, but which seems to not be that amazing. The concept of evil manifesting in mirrors is old and wide-spread in folklore, and it seems it would be fairly easy to do something low-key, creepy, and very effective with it.

I still think that’s the case, but this movie isn’t that. It starts out pretty ok, with a kaleidoscope mirror version of New York buildings, which turns them into chasms and claustrophobic boxes, with no apparent escape route. Kiefer Sutherland is an alcoholic ex-cop looking for work as a security guard, and he starts working the night shift at a burned-out old department store, where the mirrors are inexplicably clean and shiny, despite everything else beeting full of soot and suitably grungy.

There’s evil in the mirrors, of course, and although a few of the early ideas are good (there’s a handprint on the mirror, but it turns out to be on the inside, and be one of many, some of which are far up away from the floor), it soon turns to some standard-issue tortured ghosts stuff. There’s a wasted opportunity when Kiefer Sutherland looks at his face in the mirror and it goes weird and distorted, which could have been creepy (like the bathroom mirror sequence that’s only talked about, but still manages to be very scary, in The Mothman Prophecies), but just looks like a bad digital warp effect.

And then it goes downhill, because since Kiefer’s an ex-cop, he needs to investigate. And when people in mediocre horror movies start investigating, the movie is obligated to come up with explanations, and they are invariably too specific, too facile, and too obvious, and everything’s ruined. This time, it has to do with a nun who might have been schizophrenic, but maybe not, and some sort of psychiatric treatment (the place used to be a hospital, dontcha know), and then Kiefer needs to hold an elderly nun at gunpoint and then everything explodes.

And then, at the end, the movie blatantly rips off the ending of Silent Hill, which was a deeply flawed film, but still superior to this one in almost every way.

I still think there’s a good mirror horror movie to be made. But sadly, Mirrors has probably made that impossible for a few years. A wasted opportunity, especially for Aja, who had shown great promise with the The Hills Have Eyes remake a couple of years ago.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 12:13 am and is filed under Horror, Movies, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.