Poor revision
It’s always the way with horror, isn’t it? How quickly do you reveal your monster? How do you keep the scares coming once the audience knows what it’s dealing with?

It’s a problem, unfortunately, that undermines Mirrors (2008), the remake by young French director Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes (2006)) of Geoul sokeuro (2003), the as-usual far superior Asian original by Sung-ho Kim.

To be fair, it’s not as if Aja, co-writer Grégory Levasseur or lead Kiefer Sutherland haven’t at least attempted to move this away from mainstream shock-fodder, but this much-hyped makeover promises far more in the way of decent scares than it actually delivers.

Sutherland plays Ben Carson, a cop on leave from the NYPD following a tragic shooting, who’s estranged from his wife Amy (Paula Patton) and children Michael (Cameron Boyce) and Daisy (Erica Gluck), and who’s working as nightwatchman at dilapidated department store The Mayflower, which was devastated by fire five years earlier. There are an awful lot of suspiciously clean-looking mirrors in the store – and Carson is about to discover their hideous secret…

So far, so high concept. While he does resort quickly to loud, sudden sounds for cheap shock value, Aja nevertheless manages to create a fair semblance of other-world anxiety in the first 45 minutes.

However, unseen horrors cannot be hinted at indefinitely, so instead, the filmmaker resorts to an increasingly stretched explanation as to what is going down through the looking glass, one that truly fails to take the premise through to its completely overwrought conclusion which, as already stated, takes away nearly all of the built-up menace with a ludicrous, derivative battle between Carson and ‘demon’.

In addition, Patton’s performance as the wife, threatened first by Carson’s seemingly irrational behavior, then by evil forces that put their children’s lives in peril, is simply irritating – a contrived switch from sceptic to convert that does not lend any credibility to proceedings.

Along with excessive gore, there are some genuine jumps, plus a twist at the denoument that seems to belong to another, far-more subtle film, but, on reflection, you’d be far better checking out the original. A pity.

Also published on Expatica.com.

110 mins.