Mirrors Information

Mirrors is a 2008 supernatural horror film directed by Alexandre Aja, and stars Kiefer Sutherland. The film was first titled Into the Mirror, but the name was later changed to Mirrors. Filming began on May 1, 2007, and it was released in American theaters on August 15, 2008.

The film was originally scripted as a remake of the 2003 South Korean horror film Into the Mirror which is rated PG. However, once Aja was brought on board and read the script, he was dissatisfied with the particulars of the original film's story. He decided to retain the original film's basic idea involving mirrors, and to incorporate a few of its scenes, but otherwise crafted a new story and script for his version of the movie. Mirrors is the first Aja film to achieve an R rating without the need for scenes to be cut.

Plot

The film begins with a security guard running through a subway station. The guard eventually enters a room he cannot escape from and starts begging his reflection in a mirror for his life. Suddenly, his reflection cuts its throat with a mirror shard, killing the "real" security guard.

Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland), a suspended police detective, begins his first day as a night security guard at the Mayflower, a luxury department store that was gutted by a fire and shuttered for close to a decade. The building still contains numerous mirrors from the store.

On Ben's first night of patrol he finds a mirror that appears to be covered with handprints, but only on the reflected side of the glass. He sees an open door in the reflection while it is actually closed. Over time, Ben begins to see more intense visions, which he initially shrugs off as hallucinations. He soon finds the wallet of Gary Lewis, the previous night guard (who died at the beginning of the film). Inside is a note that says "Esseker". After viewing Gary's crime photos Ben is convinced that the mirrors make people do things to themselves that they are not actually doing.

Meanwhile, Ben's sister, Angela (Amy Smart) is killed by her reflection as it grips its jaw and slowly pull its mouth apart, causing her to bleed profusely. Ben is distraught when he finds her body. In anger, he attempts to destroy the mirrors at the Mayflower, but they are impervious to damage. He demands to know what the mirrors want, and cracks appear on one of the mirrors, spelling out the word "ESSEKER".

Ben enters the flooded basement of the Mayflower and finds a small sign stating "Psychiatric Studies" and "St. Matthew's Hospital" underneath. He moves to the site of the leak and begins pulling at the tiles and brick of the wall and finds a room with a chair surrounded by mirrors beyond it, a Psychomanteum. Realizing that the Mayflower was built on the site of an earlier hospital, Ben asks his police friend Larry (Jason Flemyng) to help him locate the patient-employee manifest for the hospital. Larry finds the name Anna Esseker, a patient of the psychiatric hospital. She was twelve years old at the time and died in a mass suicide.

Ben looks through Anna's file, and finds an Authorization and Consent form that negated her Death Certificate, stating that she had been discharged from the hospital two days before the suicide and is led to believe that Anna is still alive. Meanwhile, Ben's wife Amy (Paula Patton) discovers her son Michael's (Cameron Boyce) reflection acting differently than the real Michael. She calls Ben in a panic, who immediately returns home. Together they cover every reflective surface in the house with green paint.

Ben locates Anna Esseker's childhood home, and discovers that as a child she was violent and uncontrollable, and diagnosed with severe schizophrenia. She was taken in by a doctor from St. Matthew's Hospital, who believed that she was suffering from a rare personality disorder. His treatment was to confine Anna to a chair surrounded by mirrors, believing this would cure her disorder by forcing her to confront her own reflection. Ben is told by her brother that when she returned, apparently cured, strange things started to happen with the mirrors in their home. As a result her family sent her to a convent, Saint Augustine's Monastery, where mirrors are forbidden.

Ben visits the convent, and finds Anna (Mary Beth Peil), who explains that she was actually possessed by a demon, which was drawn from her and became trapped in the mirrors. She explains that it collects the souls of those it kills and if she were to return it would make it possible for the demon to be brought back into the mortal world. She refuses to go back.

Meanwhile, Amy discovers that Michael is missing at home and a thin reflective layer of water is completely covering the floor. After putting her daughter in a safe closet, she finds Michael using a chef knife to scrape the paint from the mirrors. Amy tries to stop him but he escapes, obviously possessed.

Having threatened her at gunpoint, Ben returns with Anna to the Mayflower and straps her into the chair in the Psychomanteum. Back at Ben's house Michael is suddenly pulled through the water on the floor by his reflection and begins to drown. At the Psychomanteum the lights begin to flicker and the building begins to shake as the demons in the mirrors are released. They repossess Anna and all the mirrors in the Mayflower explode. Simultaneously, Michael is released from the demon's grip and Amy is able to pull him to safety. Ben is then attacked by the repossessed Anna. He manages to kill her igniting a nearby gas line, setting off a huge explosion. The old building collapses, killing the demon, and trapping Ben under the ceiling as he rushes toward the exit.

Ben pulls himself out of the rubble and stumbles his way out of the building. Policemen and firemen are everywhere in the street, and a body is seen taken in a bag by paramedics, but nobody notices Ben. He looks at the older security guard's name tag, and sees it is written backwards, realizing everything is in reverse (like in a mirror). He comes upon a mirrored surface in the city and fails to see his own reflection as he reaches out to touch it. He realizes that he was crushed to death under the rubble and is now trapped in the mirror world: in the living world his hand appears as a handprint on the glass surface.

Cast

• Kiefer Sutherland as Ben Carson
• Paula Patton as Amy Carson
• Cameron Boyce as Michael Carson
• Erica Gluck as Daisy Carson
• Amy Smart as Angela Carson
• Mary Beth Peil as Anna Esseker
• John Shrapnel as Lorenzo Sapelli
• Jason Flemyng as Det. Larry Byrne
• Tim Ahern as Dr. Morris
• Julian Glover as Robert Esseker
• Josh Cole as Gary Lewis
• Ezra Buzzington as Terrence Berry
• Aida Doina as Rosa
• Ioana Abur as Front Desk Sister
• Darren Kent as Jimmy Esseker
• Roz McCutcheon as Jimmy's mother
• Adina Rapiteanu as Young Anna
• William Meredith as Young Doctor
• Bart Sidles as Police Inspector

Score

Javier Navarrete used a prior existing work of classical music, "Asturias" by Isaac Albéniz, as the film's main theme.

Reception

Box office

In the United States, Mirrors opened in fourth position making $11.1 million. On its second weekend, it ranked at seventh position, making a further $5 million. The film made a total of $30 million in the United States. In spite of poor reviews, the film did very well at the box office, especially in foreign cinemas, staying in the top five for its opening weekend in several countries including France, Mexico and United Kingdom, where it consistently ranked #2. It topped in the Hong Kong box office with $228,481 and stayed at the third place in Philippines and Spain. In South Korea and Russia it took #4 at the box office in its opening weekend. The film grossed $72,436,439 worldwide, including $41,745,000 from foreign cinemas.

Critical reception

The film received generally negative reviews. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 14% of critics gave the film positive reviews based on 84 reviews. Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 35 out of 100, based on 13 reviews.

Sequel

See Mirrors 2 for more information On October 8, 2009, the director Victor Garcia announced that he would begin to shoot a sequel, which would be released direct-to-DVD by 20th Century Fox. The sequel was released on October 19, 2010.