[HanCinema's Film Review] "Into The Mirror"

Mi-jeong (played by Rie Young-zin) is a backend employee at a soon-to-be-opened department store. She predictably meets an unfortunate fate in "Into The Mirror" before the introduction of our actual lead character, Yeong-min (played by Yoo Ji-tae), a cop turned security guard at the department store. Then there's the co-lead, Hyeon-soo (played by Kim Myung-min), an actual cop, who resents Yeong-min for the same reason Yeong-min quit the police.

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This particular plot thread is not terribly interesting, and while its presence in the plot isn't excessive, I was still wondering why writer/director Kim Seong-ho put this backstory in "Into The Mirror" at all. "Into The Mirror" has a fairly simple hook mostly unrelated to this characterization, and it's a good one. Some person, or some thing, is lurking in the mirrors of the department store killing people, possibly to sabotage its grand opening. Or is something else going on?

"Into The Mirror" goes far just on its use of spooky mirror scenes. It constantly feels inevitable that a mirror will reflect the wrong image at some point. This inevitability is so oppressive, characters with little reason to suspect that a mirror is unusual in any way will still get paranoid, almost as if they can hear the eerie score. One character has so totally lost his mind over mirrors that he babbles incoherently to himself in a room with no reflective surfaces whatsoever.

Another, Ji-hyeon (played by Kim Hye-na), surrounds herself with mirrors at home, an apparent means of mourning her dead identical twin sister Jeong-hyeon. There is, of course, a payoff to this backdrop, as there is in any scene where a mirror is present. "Into The Mirror" is great at anything involving the spooky mirrors. The entire notion of a mirror world, largely unexplored, is ominous in how it begs the question of what people in the mirror world would want, and why.

But "Into The Mirror" must inevitably go back down to earth to resolve its murder mystery, and this denouement is underwheming. There are a lot of interesting things a South Korean movie can do with a department store in the early aughts, given the country's unfortunate history regarding major disasters caused by cut corners in safety. "Into The Mirror" never really pursues this angle though, almost comically allowing the grand opening of the department store to go on uninterrupted despite the fact that by this point in the film multiple people have died in there.

As much as I'd like to pretend that this is social commentary about how consumerism marches on, no individual element of "Into The Mirror" is well-developed enough to support any particularly deep reading. This works great when it comes to the mirror world, which is scary because it's so mysterious, although even that veneer of mystery is mostly abandoned by the final scene which is more gimmicky than thematically purposeful. Still, for all these flaws, the ambience in "Into The Mirror" is great- a nice snapshot of the long-ended horror trend in the Korean Wave.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Into The Mirror" is directed by Kim Seong-ho, and features Yoo Ji-tae, Kim Myung-min, Kim Hye-na, Ki Joo-bong, Kim Myung-soo-I, Jung Eun-pyo. Release date in Korea: 2003/08/14.