The Black Sheep series looks back at the 2008 film Mirrors, starring Kiefer Sutherland and directed by Alexandre Aja
Before rewatching Mirrors (get it HERE), I was a little confused as to why it’s either forgotten or, honestly, kind of hated on. It was one of those movies that I saw in theaters when it came out and then have clear memories of when it came to my Blockbuster for rent. It’s got a fun cast of reliables and was directed by one of the early 2000s freshest and goriest directors. The director has gone on to have a steady and varied career and his new movie starring Halle Berry called Never Let Go sounds as intriguing as ever. After watching Mirrors again, I still really enjoyed it, but I now understand why it has the reputation it has and why it’s perfect for a black sheep. Let’s take a look but maybe be wary of any mirrors that don’t look exactly right.
When I was rewatching this for its defense, I was thinking to myself that the movie has a very unique feel. It’s like a Fulci supernatural Italian horror movie with the backbone story of an Asian ghost movie directed through the lens of a French new extreme director. Low and behold all my years of devotion to the art of exploring all that is horror led me to a somewhat true conclusion. The movie is co-written and directed by Alexandre Aja who is one of the most successful newer French directors that has also made the leap across the pond into a nice career doing movies for a more global audience. When doing the research, I found that Mirrors was co-written by frequent Aja collaborator Gregory Levasseur but there was also another credit from a man named Sung Ho Kim. That led me to his IMDb page and the discovery that Mirrors is actually a remake of a South Korean movie called Into the Mirror from 2003. That movie did well and Aja himself has had success with remakes having done an excellent job with his ultra-violent take on The Hills Have Eyes. Now, I had gone through a whole phase of watching as much J-Horror as I could, but I hadn’t really dipped my toe that deep into Korean entries yet, so I get why I missed it. It’s actually refreshing when Hollywood decides to remake a movie from somewhere else rather than something American audiences had already seen and probably not even needed.
Looking at the cast and crew, it’s a solid group. Aja helped write and direct things like High Tension, Hills Have Eyes remake, and today’s movie but he has also excelled as just either or. He only wrote P2 and the Maniac remake and was a hired gun on fun movies like Piranha 3D, Horns, Oxygen, and Crawl. His frequent writing partner Greg Levasseur also helped out writing many of Aja’s early hits and even got a shot at directing with the pretty fun found footage flick The Pyramid. The cast does its part well too. Kiefer Sutherland came back to horror for the first time in 15 years after he played a part in another American remake with The Vanishing. Of course, he is also in one of the greatest vampire flicks of all time in The Lost Boys and the underrated Flatliners.
Elsewhere we have newer faces like Amy Smart and Paula Patton as well as reliable character actors like Jayson Fleming and Julian Glover. Glover chooses the wrong grail, fought in Star Wars, appeared with James Bond and Harry Potter, and been in one of the biggest TV shows of all time. For horror though he has dodged the genre apart from Hammer’s Quatermass Experiment but that leans more into sci-fi anyway. Fleming has been in a lot more horror with my favorites being Deep Rising and From Hell. Patton is great in any genre but to date this is her only horror and Smart has been around forever with other horrors like Butterfly Effect, Campfire Tales, and Strangeland to her name.
The movie follows a haunted, burned-out old department store and we see the current night watchman. He doesn’t stay employed, or alive, for very long though and we are treated to the first of many great death scenes. He is obviously scared but then suddenly his reflection isn’t, and it uses the piece of mirror that he had in his hand to slice his throat. It’s pretty gory and feels very visceral on screen which is something audiences have definitely grown accustomed to seeing from the directors’ other movies. Something that is a little different is the length of the movie, however and it’s to the film’s detriment. At an hour and 51 minutes, one of the few complaints I have for the movie is that it can feel a little overlong. Its not like the brisk and explosive violence that the French new extremity brought and while lots of Asian horror has the longer run time, they also have much more nuance than what we see here.
The movie shows its main conceit right from the beginning and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of great horror movies show exactly what you are getting into from the beginning and still hold our attention the whole way through. We get that here too. Not only does it show the mirror monster gimmick but gives us a credit sequence that when you think about it, really isn’t that surprising. Not surprising, sure, but it is pretty neat with its mirror effects. The movie gives us the backstory of the characters in a way that brings us into what feels like a middle chapter. Something happened to Sutherlands Ben when he was a cop and now, he is about to be a security guard at the same place we just watched a dude die at. He is also in the middle of a divorce and has the stress of trying to take care of his kids. Some of what he goes through is supposed to be seen as possibly in his head though as he is stressed and taking some medications.
The movie itself follows a few of the tropes we came to expect of movies of that time with jump scares and loud sound cues but the visuals that accompany those usually are better than the sounds and execution they are given. Ben sees a lot of strange things at his work and ends up bringing them home, even seeing his own face contort in the mirror with his sister, played by Smart, assuming it’s just everything that he’s going through starting to break him. He’s still a good cop though and uses some of his old resources and instincts to investigate what could possibly be going on. He even goes to his estranged wife’s work to get her to give him information on the man’s death. Unfortunately, the case ends up having real stakes when it starts going directly after his family. His sister gets an even grislier death than the guy we saw at the start of the movie. While the CGI isn’t great as all CGI can be hit or miss, the practical inserts and the horror of what we actually see going on more than makes up for it.
Unfortunately, at a little less than an hour in, there hasn’t been a lot of action to this point, and we still have more than halfway of the run time to go. The length and speed of how the movie tells its story really is my only gripe here and the rest of it really is strong. It’s got an interesting story, cool effects, and stands out as one of the better late 2000’s horror movies. A lot of the movies from 2005 to 2010 just didn’t have the umph or punch that they could have used, and Mirrors isn’t afraid to make sacrifices to characters or have consequences and dour outcomes. The second story of the movie starts, and Ben goes deeper into why the building was burned down and even gets a hint from the mirrors. He watches video of the man who tried to burn down the building before he died in an insane asylum and again, the makeup is great here. The dude is genuinely hard to look at.
You feel for Ben throughout and while Keifer may feel like he is sleepwalking through the first part of the movie, as soon as his sister is killed and he has no leads on how to find and end the mirrors reign of terror, he goes into full on defense mode out of fear for his family. Of course, he makes things worse by looking even crazier than he already did but eventually finds out what he has to do by discovering that the department store was built on top of an old asylum and that a young patient there was caught up in something of a possession. He finds her in a mirrorless monastery and drags her back to the place where she got the demon out of her and into the mirrors. They are able to reverse this process and get the demon back in Ana where he then kills her by blowing up a huge portion of the building. Unfortunately, we learn in one of the coolest reveals if the 2000’s that Ben didn’t make it out. He saved his family but died in the explosion and notices that when he walks outside not only does nobody notice him but also that all writing is backwards. He is dead AND stuck in the mirror world.
With great practical effects and a killer ending, Mirrors was a shot in the arm for late 2000s horror. I do see why it falls to the wayside as it was sort of the start of a forgotten period by Aja. He came out hot with High Tension coming over seas as an introduction to the man and then made a better version of a 70s flick by one of our most beloved horror kings. After this we would get the fun Piranha 3D and a forgotten adaptation in Horns and even though his screenplay for Maniac is inspired, that is seen as much more of an Elijah Wood’s vehicle even if its gore and just flat-out mean attitude is in line with Aja. He would have a couple others, but Crawl would bring him back fully and really be one of his best works. While Mirrors was a moderate success making 78 million on its 35-million-dollar budget, it was absolutely wrecked by critics and a Christy Carlson Romano led direct to video sequel didn’t help its reputation. Give it a look and relish in what it is rather than focusing on what it isn’t.
A couple of the previous episodes of The Black Sheep can be seen at the bottom of this article. To see more, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
