Crew
Director/Screenplay – Kim Sung-ho, Producer – Eun-young Kim, Photography – Han-cheol Jeong, Music – Il Won. Production Company – CJ Entertainment.
Cast
Yoo Ji-tae (Woo Yeong-min), Kim Myung-min (Ha Hyun-soo), Kim Hye-na (Lee Ji-hyeon/Lee Jeong-hyeon), Gi Ju-bong (Jeong Il-seong), Jeong Eun-pyo (Kim Il-hwan)
Plot
Woo Yeong-min is a former police detective who has been forced to quit the force over an incident where he mistakenly shot his partner during a hostage situation. He is now head of security at the Dreampia department store owned by his uncle Jeong Il-seong, which is about to reopen after it was closed by a fire a year ago. The store is now struck by a series of mysterious deaths where people are killed by their reflections in the mirror. Woo and police detective Ha Hyun-soo conduct separate investigations as to the cause of these deaths.
Asian Horror went massive during the early 2000s following the international successes of the Japanese ghost stories Ring (1998) and Ju-on: The Grudge (2002). These were followed by a huge number of copies both in Japan and other countries of the Asian region – South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand. Many of these then had the rights brought up by Hollywood studios and underwent English-Language Remakes. The South Korean Into the Mirror was one of these, later undergoing English-Language remake as Alexandre Aja’s Mirrors (2008), which led to a sequel with Mirrors 2 (2010).
Into the Mirror was a directorial debut for Kim Sung-ho. For a director making a film that proved popular enough to undergo English-language remake, Kim has done surprisingly little since then. Mostly his work has been episodes of other anthology series – five in all, although only one of these enters into genre territory with Horror Stories (2013). It would be a decade before he made another feature film with How to Steal a Dog (2014) and Notebook from My Mother (2018), both non-genre works.
I was quite impressed with some of the directorial effects that Kim Sung-ho pulls off. There is the opening scene where Lee Yeong-jin goes into a bathroom, before her reflection in the mirror starts to act on its own and brings up a pizza slicer that she has stolen and slits her throat. The image as her body lies dying on the bathroom floor and the blood trickles out, following the square groove patterns of the tiles is an arty effect. It creates something undeniably eerie. There is another fine sequence where the peeping tom security guard is travelling down in the mirrored elevator and sees his reflection infinitely reflected between either side of the elevator wall – only for one of the reflections to ominously turn around.
The great disappointment of Into the Mirror is that is essentially it. It is as though Kim Sung-ho has become more wound up in his plot about the two parallel investigations and forgotten that he is also making a horror film. This may be one case where the English-language remake actually improved the film. With Mirrors, Alexandra Aja keeps several of the key scenes mentioned above but adds several more of his own. He retains the same overall plot and structure but adds explanations about souls trapped in the mirrors. Dropped are some of the more complicated aspects – the security guard and the investigating detective and their dual investigations is trimmed down to just one character, while the twin sisters are condensed down into a single character. On the other hand, I did feel that the Korean version managed to make the ending work far better than the remake did.
Trailer here