Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror is unlike anything I have ever seen. The film is a surreal and blurry mirror into Tarkovsky’s dreams and memories. It’s hard to explain how, but almost every scene feels as random as it does significant, and this ambiguity of significance adds a lot to the enchanting dream-like feel that this film has. Some scenes, regrettably, don’t resonate with me the way that others do, but the beauty, poetry and emotion in many scenes is impossible to articulate. Tarkovsky’s smooth, careful and precise camerawork and the way it navigates nature, family, relics and spaces of Tarkovsky’s past is spiritually haunting and visually mesmerizing. The monologues and poems written by his father are beautiful, and paired with the images, its beauty can be emotionally overwhelming. The film is evidently so deeply personal that I think it is impossible to appreciate this film to its fullest extent unless you are Tarkovsky himself. Meditations on his family and country are often mesmerizing, but some sequences, for me, went on a little too long and lost me. I feel that if I could cut out 20 minutes total from trimming down a few scenes, this would be INCREDIBLY high up with my all-time favourites. Perhaps that is a sacrilegious thing to say about a film by the Russian God of filmmaking, but I just have to be honest. Maybe my opinion on this will change when I see it for a third time. Despite some scenes going on a little too long for me, this thing is still essentially a masterpiece of filmmaking. Many of the sequences in this film are simply the best I have ever seen, period, and the ending was perfect. Tarkovsky’s poetic cinematography and spiritual tone are in no way lost in this film, in fact they are perhaps most realized in many of this films sequences. There are many sequences that blew me away and I admire this personal and spiritual piece of filmmaking so much. The sounds and images culminate into something that is so incredibly serene, I think it should be experienced by all. I finished the film feeling incredibly inspired and spiritually moved by its dreamlike presentation as well as its poetic and personal meditations.

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