Mirrors (2008)

dir. Alexandre Aja

The central premise of Mirrors is that mirrors are scary. That’s pretty much all there is to go on. Malevolent forces live on the other side of the glass. Kiefer Sutherland’s ex-detective does his utmost to battle them, but he does little to battle his stock ex-detective character tropes of “tormented”, “paranoid”, and “always frowning”. Of course, there’s the classic horror shtick of a character’s schizophrenia or personality disorder actually being the work of terrible terrible demons – because a film where mirrors are scary was never going to delve deep into the psychology of the human mind. Why explore trauma or psychosis when you can blame it on that most evil of entities: mirrors?