by Karyn L. Beach

The premise for Mirrors immediately piqued my interest because I’m sort of scared of them myself. I have a fear that one morning, or night, I’ll wake up and see something other than myself staring back at me. I was curious to see what they’d do with a similar premise. My fear still terrifies me at times, this movie did not.

Ben Carson (Keifer Sutherland), a disgraced police detective, is a man trying to put his life back together. He’s living on his sister’s (Amy Smart) couch while he is estranged from his wife (Paula Patton) and their kids. He gets a job as the night watchman for an old burned out department store. The previous watchman was driven mad by the mirrors and it doesn’t take long before their fiery and gory images get Carson and his family caught up in them as well.

Mirrors is both a horror film and a bit of a mystery as Carson sets out to find out the truth behind the mirrors.

At first, I was interested and I was in. I wanted to see what happened. I wanted to know what was going on. When a couple of things didn’t add up, I stayed with it. I thought, “It will all come together in the end.” As the mystery began to unfold though, I realized that it wasn’t going to come together at all.

I’m a huge 24 fan and I like Keifer Sutherland but with his intensity and penchant for random yelling, I saw a little too much Jack Bauer in Ben. And Paula Patton. Poor Paula Patton, she had the thankless job of the wife/coroner who really nagged Ben in the beginning and got to act all terrified at the end after she’d seen a few creepy reflections.

I guess my biggest problem with Mirrors is that it had a decent premise and it created a scenario where you wanted to know what was really going on with the mirrors. As you begin to find out, it gets more and more preposterous and in the end, you still don’t know what the heck happened. The ending wasn’t what I expected, but it didn’t make much sense either.