Frightfest Review: The Mirror

I don’t know about you, but I am coming very close to burnout when it comes to found footage movies.

To be sure, the odd one creeps through every now and then that offers something to quicken the pulse, but more often than not the films are tired, sluggish affairs where you know exactly where the film is heading very early on.

Such is the case with director Ed Boase’s The Mirror, an admirable effort considering the movie’s meagre budget of just £20,000, but a film that offers very little in the way of surprise – or excitement for that matter.

Taking the unusual step of setting its stall out as a ‘sequel’ to real-life events, the film focuses on a trio of budding filmmakers/spook sleuths who purchase a supposedly haunted mirror in the hope of getting some creepy footage to win a paranormal documentary contest (and the wedge of money on offer).

This mirror, you see, was offloaded by a couple of Londoners after they fell foul of illness, financial difficulties and plenty of things that go bump in the night.

You wouldn’t know that though unless you went in to the film with some prior knowledge, as Boase elects to ignore any sort of back story for the mirror, which seems a mystifying decision.

After all, if you were trying to put together an award-winning documentary, wouldn’t you spend some of that time investigating the origins of the mirror, the previous owners and what incidents it was supposedly ‘responsible’ for? Obviously not.

Anyways, the threesome – Matt (Joshua Dickinson), Matt’s girlfriend Jemma (Jemma Dallendar) and Steve (Nate Fallows) set about locking themselves away from the world in Matt’s flat and recording everything in the hope of something creepy popping up on camera.

Eventually it does, but only after endless scenes of nothing and small talk that are likely to test the patience of even the most forgiving horror fan.

Even worse, the three leads offer precious little in terms of giving you anything to really care about – Matt is pretty bland, Steve comes across as an immensely unlikeable prick who clearly wants to get into the pants of his best mate’s missus, while Jemma has very little to do apart from mope about (a thankless task for Dallendar).

Boase does show a deft touch set-up wise every now and then, and has quite clearly wrung every last penny out of the budget for a film that, in all honesty, looks pretty polished.

The Mirror is far, far removed from being a bad film – it just isn’t a good one.

VERDICT: [rating=2]