How horror movie Mirrors takes us through the looking glass – and why it shoots itself in the foot.
NYPD detective Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland) is on leave from the force after causing the death of another officer. A recovering alcoholic to boot, Ben takes up a post as night watchman for the Mayflower, a luxury department store lying in ruins after a fire five years earlier.
For Ben, it’s a lonely life, but one that puts distance between him and his past. But the Mayflower has a troubled history of its own and, at night, it plays out in the store’s many mirrors. Then the malevolent mirror world seeps into Ben’s home life … and takes no prisoners.
Inspired by 2003 Korean film, Geoul sogeuro (Into the Mirror), Alexandre Aja’s US remake has effective jump scares, memorably disturbing gore, and effects that continue to feel fresh. On top of that, it’s packed with intriguing ideas, a vein of sadness, and the kind of open-ended ambiguity that can transform a decent film into a classic.
… well, that’s the first hour. The second half over-eggs the backstory and drowns in detail, while its family focus belongs to a lesser movie.
Mirrors, then, isn’t a classic. Nonetheless, its story reveals interesting things about horror, humanity and cursed cops. When it works, it’s fiendish – and that’s entirely a triumph of Gothic storytelling.
This page unpacks 2008 horror movie Mirrors with spoilers, plus references to suicide and mental illness (as they appear in cinema narratives as opposed to reality).
The infinity mirror
It’s no surprise a movie called Mirrors should play out through its reflections. Principally, this means the movie’s many mirrored surfaces, but also the story’s narrative doubling (intentional or otherwise).
Take the Mayflower building. Now a charred ruin, it’s an imposing but burned-out shell. Inside are things that look human yet aren’t: evil spirits, visions, mannequins. It’s an empty, hopeless place haunted by a terrible past.
Of course, in this, it entirely parallels protagonist Ben Carson.
Ben is grinding through existence, merely surviving on the outside but hollow and hopeless on the inside. He’s trapped in the past, a wound that repeatedly erupts in anger and addiction, and estranges him from family and colleagues.
Significantly, this doesn’t change over the course of the film. When we first meet Ben, he’s trapped in a hollow world of his own making. By the end … well, he’s still in the void.
Isolation and the uncanny
So the Mayflower represents aspects of Ben; both are damaged and haunted characters. But the department store’s charred interior also illustrates his unspoken angst: not just in having caused a tragic death, but his unquenchable isolation from other people, from the rest of the world.
This becomes a literal remoteness at the end of the film. But initially, the narrative foreshadows and reflects his loneliness in eerie ways.
In Gothic storytelling, the uncanny is situated in things that seem almost familiar, yet disconcertingly strange: human-like dolls or robots, for instance.
The uncanny also applies to things that are both hidden and revealed – such as mirrors that simultaneously reflect reality and the vanished past.
The big-screen adaptation of I Am Legend picked up on the uncanny eeriness of mannequins a year earlier. But in both films, mannequins also speak to our human need for connection, and the pathos – and peril – of trying to communicate with things that only resemble us on the outside.
Of course, the mannequins are another kind of warped reflection of Ben, too. Like him, they look human, but lack the spark that makes them truly alive. Worse, they’re charred and melted, like plastic corpses of the people who died in the fire.
Wherever you look, then, this story is trapped in the past. But whose past, and why?
Talking backwards: a story summary
In 1951, Dr Kane hears about 12-year-old Anna Esseker, who suffers from violent fits. Her family think she’s possessed but Kane says it’s schizophrenia, a mental illness he can cure.
Kane brings Anna to St Matthew’s hospital, but once there, conducts inhumane procedures. One involves strapping Anna to a chair in a mirrored room for days so that she can confront her “split personalities”.
But Anna is possessed and, during Kane’s treatment, is accidentally cured when her demon becomes trapped in the mirror.
This spirit can’t escape the mirror world, but travels between reflected surfaces. It possesses the reflections of people it encounters and, by acting out their suicide in the mirror, causes them to die for real. Each time, it sucks their soul into the limbo of the mirror world.
This culminates in the mass murder of all of Kane’s patients on the same day in 1952. Kane lies and says Anna died, too. In fact, she goes into hiding in a monastery (where mirrors are banned).
The Meredith family buy the hospital and turn it into the Mayflower. Years later, watchman Terrence Berry murders his family and burns the store, killing scores of people in the process. Berry claims the mirrors murdered his family, and he started the fire to destroy them.
Berry’s fate repeats and reflects in other men. One of these is security guard Gary Lewis, Ben’s predecessor who, like Dr Kane, “kills himself” with a shard of broken mirror.
Berry also predicts Ben’s potential fate: losing his ex-wife and two kids, and then his own life. Ben’s only hope is to fetch Anna back to either satisfy or slay the demon.
Like Berry, Ben thinks he has destroyed the demon with fire, only to become trapped in the mirror world, too.
Choosing Ben Carson
It’s somewhat convenient that Ben stumbles into a job at the Mayflower: his mix of vulnerability, futility and law enforcement make him, well, the ideal candidate. Perhaps that’s the point (see also Vertigo).
The Mayflower is a modern take on an ancient institution: the Gothic haunted house. Consider:
- This is the city that never sleeps, yet the Mayflower revels in isolation (see also Rosemary’s Baby).
- The building is huge and grand, yet the ruined past is everywhere, along with hidden rooms and labyrinthine basements.
- Its ghostly echoes invoke Gothic doubling, the uncanny and liminality (more of that below).
- Rather than a fragile heroine, we have a male protagonist who is an equally unreliable narrator. This is signalled by alcohol dependency, medication, and a judgmental spouse.
- The Mayflower is literally built upon a stalwart of 00s horror: psychiatric locations that are themselves deranged (see also The Ring).
- While the building is possessed, it’s the protagonist who is haunted. This is significant to the narrative, as it allows the action to happen in other locations … although hold that thought.
We’ve seen these elements countless times in cinema, not least in The Shining. Both films in particular share the idea of a possessed house inhabiting its protagonist from the inside out.
Like The Shining’s damaged dad, Ben has a drink problem. The Mayflower, like the Overlook, even tempts its acolyte with booze. Both men accordingly grow estranged from their families, and instead obsess over newspaper clippings and caretaker’s anecdotes. And, ultimately, neither escapes the building that consumes their thoughts.
It follows, then, that the Mayflower chooses Ben from the start. It lures him in, like a moth to a flame … and then it burns him.
Sub-liminal spaces and the mirror trick
At the end of the film, Ben discovers no one else can see him. Backwards writing on name badges and cop cars reveals the horrific truth: he’s one more ghost inside the mirror world.
Earlier, Ben says it feels like something in the mirror is watching him back. The looking glass is thus no longer passive and flat, but has agency and depth. Either way, its off-kilter reflections are agents of the uncanny … but they’re also “liminal”.
In Gothic literature, liminal applies to ambiguous or contradictory elements, to things in transition or which can’t be resolved. Ben is a liminal character – he’s between worlds, emotionally and, later, literally.
Windows and doorways between worlds, states or boundaries can also be liminal. For example, the hole Ben kicks through into the hospital.
Then there are the mirrors themselves. Their images are both reflections and independent of reality. And how do Ben and Anna describe them? As two-way portals, i.e., windows.
The movie’s ending completes this thought. Something is watching from beyond the mirror, whether some evil force or those souls it traps in limbo.
Ultimately, Ben becomes one more disappeared dead man, just like Gary Lewis. But the question is: when exactly does Ben vanish into the mirror world?
The twist suggests it happens at the end of the film, when he (presumably) dies in the explosion. And yet, on his first night in the Mayflower, we watch Ben climb down into the flooded basement. Above him, in a mirror reflection, the door to the basement quietly closes.
So is Ben already inside the mirror world, or merely under its influence? Does the story we watch unfold happen in Ben’s reality, or is it all reflection?
The switch
Ben’s theory is that the mirror plays out what it wants to happen and, by doing so, makes it happen for real. It’s a device of influence, in other words.
This fits with his basement journey: the mirror shows him a door, and invites him to enter. Whether the door closing in the mirror indicates evil intention or actual fact is ambiguous.
However, the dreamlike narrative after this point suggests Ben has climbed into the mirror, or that he (and we) are watching the mirror’s projected desires.
Hence, while Lorenzo tells him there’s no electricity in the building, the lights somehow work in the flooded basement.
More significantly, we don’t see Ben return from the basement. Somehow he later turns up in his apartment … with a weirdly melting face.
Then there’s the way Ben’s colleagues seamlessly serve up confidential info. Notably, this is all linked to the Mayflower, and feeds Ben’s growing obsession, rather like that delivery of news clippings from Gary Lewis (who is dead, so couldn’t have sent them).
Either way, it seems the Mayflower is pulling the strings. Why? To help Ben deliver Anna Esseker back to the hall of mirrors. This is the madness that drives all the men in the story. As Terrence Berry screams: “We’re all looking for Esseker!”
When Ben finds a hand print on the wrong side of a mirror, it foreshadows the twist ending. He even places his hand against it, as if trying it on for size. More significantly, it seems to fit …
The ruined, reflected self
Earlier we considered that the Mayflower could represent one aspect of Ben Carson. But perhaps this twinning of building and psyche goes much further.
Ben’s exploration of the derelict Mayflower is a metaphor for excavating the self. Entering the basement ultimately confronts him with truths he’s hidden from himself, i.e., his drinking, anger and isolation. And it’s somewhat on the nose that the building he unearths is a psychiatric hospital.
The medical explanation of Terrence Berry’s psychosis could also describe Ben. According to the doc, feelings of self hatred cause a split in recognition of the self. In such a state, a reflection in a mirror may be perceived as an entirely independent being, in a separate world.
This is what the film would have us believe, too. However, it flips between magic and madness as the cause of the doubling we perceive (without resolving which is truly the case).
Of course, mirroring and mirrored characters appear to inventive ends across cinema narratives of all kinds. The Gothic double, though, relates to characters that resemble each other (or are the same person) yet behave in opposite ways, i.e., Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Often, this reveals the protagonist’s persona from different angles or extremes. In Black Swan, Nina’s double – which resembles her but behaves in quite shocking ways – enables her transition to sexual maturity.
In Mirrors the literal doubling of reflected selves similarly portrays the protagonist’s unspeakable fantasies and desires (suicide, sororicide, immolation of self and other).
Speaking of Ben Carson as a haunted individual, keep in mind that he (or rather, his reflection) is also a vehicle for the demon between locations. This possession works kind of like contamination – not of individuals, but their reflections.
Gothic falls
Mirrors, then, is an ambiguous piece of storytelling, and that ambiguity is a fascinating place to dawdle. In the end, though, it’s the story’s Gothic parts which are best realised.
The narrative has two principal elements, past and present and, in its Gothic portions, the past dominates. Hence the Mayflower is frozen in ruined history … and so is Ben.
Similarly, his journey throughout is into the past, first via mirror visions, then newspaper clippings and trips to Pennsylvania and psychiatric institutions. He breaks into the ruins of St Matthews, finally resurrecting its terrible history when he fetches Anna back.
The story’s Gothic and modern locations similarly align with this sense of past and present:
- The Mayflower / St Matthews, plus other Gothic or backwards-looking locations, i.e., Anna’s home, the monastery and the psychiatric institute.
- Ben’s world, comprising his sister’s apartment and the family home. These are broadly un-Gothic: not backwards looking, not ruined.
- Some locations are liminal i.e., neither here nor there. For instance, the subway where Gary Lewis dies, the hospital morgue, and the limbo of the mirror world.
The film would have us believe the Gothic grotesqueness of the Mayflower can contaminate modern spaces but, once we leave the Gothic behind, the story’s dread crumbles, too.
It isn’t that the film only succeeds when it’s Gothic. Like I said up top, there are problems too of length and lost focus … plus tropes of psychiatry that are kinda troubling.
Incidentally, the modern world has Gothic elements, too: young children and haunted mirrors. But these locations lack the ambiguity and ruined grandeur of the Mayflower (not to mention their uncanny mannequins). This strand of the story simply can’t compete; it feels pedestrian and mismatched to what’s come before.
Back to the beginning
Like The Ring’s video cassette or Poltergeist’s TV static, mirrors in this movie are a strategy of domestic terror. They’re a gimmick; something to trigger unease long after the film is over.
As Ben says, for our benefit as much as his wife’s: avoiding mirrors is impossible. So much of our world is shiny and reflective. In fact, from robots and mannequins to glossy décor and fancy tech, we seemingly crave seeing ourselves – or aspects of ourselves – everywhere.
Keep in mind the film’s introduction of Ben via reflections (in a TV screen and various mirrors) suggests one other possibility.
The man we meet is disconnected from reality by guilt, grief and isolation. To some degree, Ben is already absent from reality. We might wonder what his descent into the basement signifies but, equally, there’s a possibility that he’s never not in the mirror world and, by implication, neither are we.
This film takes us through the looking glass from its opening credits … and holds us there.
Mirrors (2008), directed by Alexandre Aja
What to read or watch next
- Flatliners, The Lost Boys (horror, Kiefer Sutherland)
- The Devil’s Advocate (movies that take place in mirrors)
- The Omen (a clever use of mirroring)
- The Departed (cinema doubling beyond horror)
- Shutter Island, Gothika (horror, tropes of mental illness)
- Alien, Insidious (Gothic horror)
Picture credit: David Underland via Unsplash
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