I must admit I couldn’t yield to sleep the first night I left the theater still half-dazed by Mirrors. Trapped in the oppressive virtuality of evil, there lay a point of conceiving how could such dimension be freed from if it left curse as it passed one reflection onto the other, very unavoidably.
Only one source of evil was believed to have unleashed its clout. She’d been a schizophrenic patient at St. Matthew’s Hospital in the early ‘50s (which burned as Mayflower store) whom the psychiatrist clutched in a cell filled on all sides with huge panels of mirror. The doctor devised as much as he theorized that confronting such disorder vis-à-vis would enable his patient, Anna Esseker, to filter down a reasonable identity out of her disturbances.
Nearly six decades later, Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland), a suspended NYPD officer was sent over to replace the night watch at the now eerie Mayflower ruins. Despite what crept in the basement and in the middle chamber, Ben was curiosity-driven rather than stupefied. While Ben walked on, clueless, the mirrors absorbed his reflection and magnetized back its darker spirit which freely roamed his place, thereby affecting the loved ones close by with its power to inflict everywhere through adverse reflections.
Ben’s wife, Amy (Paula Patton) would only shrug off any confidence toward his annoying behavior, sustained with self-righteous view of things around the incapacitated husband who’d been rendered weak due to a former vice. Then when she finally attested to the horrifying answers herself, Amy deplored her lack of faith and cooperated as he matched pieces of evidence from the former victims, Gary and Terrence.
Like with most urban legends, working beyond nature was no surprise for the living mirror’s request to restore possession of Esseker. High with vindictive will to survive with his family and to give his sister’s case fair justice, Ben plunged into great lengths to reach the destination of hope, where mirrors did not dare follow. Wimpled Esseker was holding on to seclusion at St. Augustine Monastery which concealed the fact that she was still (untouchably) alive, contrary to the legal papers claiming otherwise. Ben didn’t leave her room for reluctance, forcing her return to end what she had started. She then took the cost resolutely, allowing the mirrors of the cell rapaciously exude back to her all the ripping personalities from which young Anna triumphantly broke away once prior her distant retirement.
Where on one hand Amy and their two kids emerged on the surface from near-drown depth to jubilant ending, Ben also rose to his feet on the other. And boy after real defining clash with the solid devil, shall I say, a mere sign of life for him ought to be alarming. Was it over? Almost. In fact, the enthusing twist was there. And guess what composed him other than lesions from violent jolts? The mirror. Who’d have imagined the misery’s open-ended like that? Everything went smoothly virtual while he saw the course of the real world on the same set running just as normal. Difference is, this time, nothing confined him like before when souls were always collected and tortured to mourn inside the mirrors. How come? Well, that must be a bit insane unless there’s inconspicuous link awaiting thought or that the film may have actually implied part two. How could Ben Carson ever go back? Was there supposed to be another key after Anna’s death?
Sutherland’s attempt at suspense wasn’t much of a thriller but he obviously invested efforts to fit himself in an unlikely role who exasperated the worst as well as the better off, in response to devastating truth behind horrible deaths for which most people’s logical concerns remained inattentive.
Clearly it was not just psychiatric disorder at its extreme but one which wouldn’t avail healing by human resources. It was contagious evil siege with its own set of psychokinetic powers, flooding waters where it may to create more reflections (of personalities based on how worse their opposites could get). And the mirrors, maintaining defiance, just couldn’t be shattered. To witness a reflection which, once implanted by the person staring at the mirror, would eventually detach from synchronization, moving differently and hurting itself to kill the person, competently qualified a goose-bumps-raiser, being very seldom concept that it was.
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