First things first when it comes to Alexandre Aja's Mirrors -- no one could be naïve enough to think that emerging genre talent Aja was above remakes at this point in his career; after all, his third feature as a director was a remake of an American horror classic (The Hills Have Eyes) and his fifth scheduled feature is a remake of the John Sayles-scripted, Joe Dante directed cult killer-fish flick, Piranha. When the trailer for Mirrors initially dropped, though, it appeared that Aja had jumped on the J-horror bandwagon about five years too late. So slavish to the conventions of that particular regional subgenre did it appear to be that one almost expected to see Roy Lee listed as a producer, though fortunately for horror fans, Mirrors isn't quite as paint-by-numbers as the film's unimaginative advertising campaign may have suggested. Anyone who has ever awoken in the middle of the night to gaze into that mirror across the room and wonder if someone -- or something -- was gazing back, unseen, from the other side is bound to be unsettled by the central premise of Mirrors, and despite the fact that Aja and longtime writing partner Gregory Levasseur have made the film a bit top-heavy with jump scares, the truth is that there are some pretty unsettling images and ideas at work here.
Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland) is a former NYPD detective who was booted out of the force after accidentally killing an undercover cop. After falling into an anguished alcoholic haze, he's finally attempting to get his life together by tossing out the bottle and going to work as a security guard. He seems to be on the right track, too -- if not a bit on edge -- but that all begins to change after Carson starts noticing strange things in the spotless mirrors of the burnt-out department store he's been charged with safeguarding. Though Carson tries his damnedest to convince his sympathetic sister and estranged wife that sinister forces seem to be at work all around them, both write off his fantastic warnings as the fever-dream result of too much stress or overmedication, leaving them wide open to attack from the force that dwells on the other side of the glass.
As derivative as some of the ideas in Mirrors first appear, Aja and Levasseur do make Carson's race to solve the mystery of the looking glass and save his family a pretty tense affair by contrasting the detective sequences with some fairly gruesome and decently executed death scenes, and once Carson discovers the origins of the curse, Aja pulls out all the stops in order to ratchet up the fear quotient. The visually minded director milks the spooky atmosphere of the fire-damaged department store for all it's worth as well, getting plenty of malevolent mileage out of scenes where a jumpy Sutherland wanders the darkened corridors with his trusty flashlight. A key scene in which his character finally figures out just what's happening behind the glass packs an especially spooky punch; the final showdown is an effects-heavy whopper that strives to disturb by taking things into Exorcist-type territory (though it goes a bit too over-the-top for its own good); and the quietly unsettling coda ends the film on a note that's effectively disorienting and spooky, making Mirrors a passable mainstream diversion that's slightly better than initial appearances may suggest.
Perhaps if Aja and Levasseur could somehow manage to hop off of the remake train, get back to the basics, and go to work crafting some original ideas, they could recapture the gruesome unpredictability of something like High Tension; until that day, it appears that their fans will have to settle for product that's simply too focused on flash to pack any real punch.