DVD Corner: Mirrors Greg Kaczynski

Mirrors opens promisingly enough. Audiences follow a man, a security guard, through subway tunnels lit by director Alexandre Aja’s now trademark moody green fluorescent lights. The man is terrified and is running from someone…or something. He stumbles into a locker room where every mirror in the room stands at attention, reflecting back his own horror at him. After a bit of common horror movie dialogue, the man slits his own throat with a shard of mirror, and in this special unrated DVD version (Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment; MSRP: $29.99), the gore sprays all over the walls, a geyser of blood jetting out and covering all that surrounds the dying man. This strong opening is creepy and it feels like viewers are in for another Aja wild ride (he also directed High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes remake), and for the most part, Mirrors does pretty well.

The story (remade from the Korean movie Geoul Sokeuro) surrounds Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland), an out of work cop who has a whole basket of personal troubles. He’s trying to stay sober, trying to keep his family together and trying to maintain his own piece of mind after accidentally shooting a fellow cop. Looking for work, he picks up a night job as a security patrolman at a burned out Mayflower department store. The daytime guard warns him that the place gets creepy at night, but just how creepy he doesn’t get into.

Immediately after being hired, Carson experiences a night of strange happenings; it seems the mirrors in the store are reflecting back the horrors of the victims of the fire that shut down the store.

I’m going to stop right here and spare you from the eventually revealed details of the abandoned mental hospital, the family in trouble and the disturbed patient; once it begins to unravel, it will all feel very familiar.

Sutherland, however, is great; he gives a nuanced performance that is believable and really lifts his character above the competition. The personal struggles that Ben is dealing with flesh out the character, and Sutherland is more than capable as an actor to handle the material.

The material, however, is endlessly frustrating, as every brilliant idea and concept that’s introduced is rapidly followed by lazy writing. For instance, Ben has a nasty hallucination and finds the previous security guard’s wallet (the guy who slit his throat in the subway) and a slip of paper within and regards it as some particularly important piece of evidence, but his character has discovered nothing about the story, no reason why he would find that slip of paper at all interesting. At a point in the story when Ben realizes mirrors are dangerous to those he loves, instead of taking all of the mirrors outside of his house or even smashing them, he goes through the arduous task of painting all of them. It’s situations like this that are killing the modern horror genre. These films (or at least scenes in the films) are clearly “written by committee:” the characters doing things that look cool but make no logical sense.

Plus, Mirrors is guilty of the old standby of bad horror films and thrillers: a character’s reticence to simply explain what is on their mind so they instead speak cryptically to other characters conveniently allowing for miscommunication and alienation of the main character. Plus, the explanation of everything that’s been going on, the entire plot, is given in three very glib, unsatisfying sentences.

This doesn’t even get into the (I’m being polite here) lackluster CGI effects that plague the movie. Look, if you need to set Sutherland on fire, hire a stunt actor; there are plenty who need the work and it would probably be cheaper than CGI--not to mention look more effective.

Mirrors is not a terrible film, but it could have been so much better. Aja is a great choice for translating “Asian Extreme” films as he’s unafraid to tackle the nastiness, but the writing has got to get better. It’s a new era: audiences are more sophisticated, and producers have got to stop pandering.

The Mirrors DVD contains a little more than an hour of standard special features; there are a couple documentaries, deleted scenes and a brief look at the alternate ending.

“Reflections: The Making of Mirrors” is the larger of the two documentaries, running just around 50 minutes. It goes into the making of the film, and there are a plethora of interviews with the cast and crew. Nothing particularly interesting is revealed, it’s strictly by the book stuff, however, it’s interesting to hear that director Aja didn’t even realize that Mirrors was a remake of a Korean film and that he nearly rejected the job.

The other documentary, “Behind the Mirror,” is actually really fascinating. Though it only runs around 20 minutes (which is a shame, considering the length of the other, inferior doc), it covers the legends and history of mirrors. This is the kind of stuff viewers would see on the History or Discovery Channel, the kind of stuff that even though you can watch it and consider it ridiculous, deep down you wonder. Honestly, this is more frightening than the film itself.

There are eight deleted scenes included with optional Aja commentary, and these, sadly, are quite forgettable. Aja doesn’t have very much insight to share about the scenes, and you’re better off saving your time. Included in these deleted scenes is also an alternate ending, which is vaguely interesting, but the best one really is used in the final cut.

All in all, Mirrors is a renter, and it’s not a bad one, just don’t spend too much on the rental fee because it’s really not a great one either.

Mirrors is now available on DVD.