Mirrors 2 (DVD)

Release date: January 24th 2011
Certificate (UK): 18
Running time: 86 minutes

Director: Victor Garcia

Cast: Nick Stahl, Emmanuelle Vaugier, Evan Jones, Christy Carlson Romano, William Katt, Lawrence Turner, Stephanie Honore, Jon Michael Davis, Wayne Pere, Lance E. Nichols

I was about six years old when I walked past a mirror late one night on my way to fetch a glass of water. I did as I always do when its night time, I never looked into the mirror.

My mother used to tell me these stories about kids who wake up in the night and catch a glimpse of themselves in the mirror… if it was after midnight…they die! Even as a grown man now I know it was just a story to keep me in my bed at night, but I still keep my head down if I walk past a mirror after midnight. Just in case.

When Mirrors, the remake of the 2003 Korean film Into the Mirror by Sung-ho Kim, came out in 2008 I was especially curious but it turned out to be a far simpler scenario than the ones I had been dreaming up or reading about over the years. 2 years later its sequel arrived, and again I was curious to see if our modern age had been able to come up with a new take on those old stories.

It stars Nick Stahl whom we might remember from Terminator 3 and the ill-fated HBO television series Carnivale. He plays Max, a man who is haunted by the death of his girlfriend. He’s depressed, in counselling and has an addiction to pills, but he decides to go to work for his father as a security guard at the Mayflower department store.

Before Max can get settled in, there are strange reflections in the mirrors and very soon employees start dying in gruesome ways. There’s also an ongoing missing person’s case and the previous security guard who munched on the glass from a broken mirror.

They all tie in together to reveal an all too familiar ghost and revenge plot. Mirrors 2 seems to have started with what could be the most gruesome death scenes for two of it’s minor characters and then filling in a story around them. It contains very little suspense and offers nothing new to the genre or to the mythology of mirrors in general, merely rehashing what we already know from countless movies before. There are also two detectives in the movie and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out if they were an intentional comedy act or not because their line delivery verges so heavily on being a spoof that it’s impossible to take them seriously.

Folklore tells us there will be seven years bad luck if we break a mirror because that’s how long it takes for the soul to renew itself. We’re supposed to bury their piece within seven hours. Others say a broken mirror falling from a wall is a sign that someone is going to die. Some people cover all the mirrors in their house after a death and there are those who believe it is inauspicious to sleep near a mirror because it can suck your soul into oblivion. And there have been writers like Lewis Carroll who sought to give a different take on the superstition of mirrors when he wrote Alice through the Looking Glass.

With so many mythologies and superstitions to be inspired from throughout history, it’s disappointing that Mirrors 2 fails to pull together a story, cast and director that wouldn’t miss such an opportunity.

If I see this on a shelf somewhere, I’ll be inclined to do what I’ve always done when it comes to mirrors after midnight: keep my head and just keep walking…