Alexandre Aja is an interesting cat. Despite having an incredible sense for horror and a great visual style, he tends to choose films that always lose the audience in the last moments of the film. His breakout film High Tension redefined the brutal killer genre until falling flat on its face in the last five minutes when it revealed that it had been cheating and lying to the audience for the previous hour and a half. The result was a great film that no longer made sense and made its audience angry. His follow-up, the remake of The Hills Have Eyes was a brutal assault on the senses, but went so far over the top at the end that audiences ultimately felt disconnected (although I'm one of the few who really liked it). Now Aja's new film, Mirrors, once again clutches defeat from the jaws of victory by offering a very cool supernatural thriller with a fascinating buildup and a cheesy, almost embarrassing climax. And while the last moments of the film are perfectly executed, the bizarre, out-of-place demonic fight scene cuts the movie's legs out from under it.

But much like his other films, the rest of the movie is unique and solid enough to warrant checking it out.

Mirrors is the story of Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland), a police detective on administrative leave who takes a security guard job to make ends meet. Trouble is, the place he takes a job at is haunted by a mysterious force that shows him horrible things in the many mirrors scattered about the burned-out husk of a building. Creepy, character-driven and taking the time to explain and unravel its own mythology, this is (for the most part) an entertaining, devilish thriller. There are some "beautiful" gore scenes engineered by special effects wizard (and the N in KNB) Gregory Nicotero, and enough of the film is inventive enough to creep out even the bravest of horror nuts. But the climax is ludicrous, taking you so far out of the movie that you almost instantly forget everything you liked about the film.

The extras, while interesting, aren't much to sneeze at. There's a making-of, which is fairly lengthy and goes into all the aspects of what they were trying to accomplish with the film -- from the takes to the original source material to how they did some of the big sequences. Every major choice in the film is discussed at length and both the successes and failures of the film can be found in what Aja and company have to say here. Then there's a curious but poorly assembled featurette on the history of mirrors and their uses in the occult. There's some great information here, but sadly many of the talking heads are too dry -- or, in one case, one has a lisp that is extraordinarily distracting. The disc also sports deleted scenes including alternate endings that would have radically changed the movie -- one for the better, one for the much, much worse.

While this is a heavily flawed film and won't go down in horror history, it's definitely an interesting failure and something worth checking out. Mirrors is available now from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

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