Thursday, October 20, 2011

The Kitchen Sink Approach: The Witch's Mirror

The Witch's Mirror hits about every horror bullet point established up to the time of it's release. I'm not sure that I've ever seen a movie that tries to cover the bases so fully. This is going to be spoiler heavy because The Witch's Mirror is ridiculous.



The movie starts off with narration about what it is to be a witch over images of witchy illustrations. We're really set up for a lot of classic, Halloween-style witchery. Instead, we get a mirror that predicts the future in and acts as a manner to speak to the dead (I always thought the witch's mirror was something concocted in Snow White and never really thought it might be a part of the folklore). Elena (Dina de Marco) learns that her husband is going to kill her and her witch friend/servant, Sara (Isabela Corona), asks Lucifer (Satan) for help but is told that she'd be punished for interfering with fate. I was actually really hoping for a Minority Report-esque plot point about preventing future crimes. Alas...

So the husband Eduardo (Armando Calvo) poisons Elena's milk because all castles have poison and Elena, even though she knows her husband is going to try to kill her drinks the milk with slight reluctance and dies. That's how fate works? She couldn't have "accidentally" dropped the glass to buy herself some time? Sara vows to avenge Elena's death, as one does.

Instead of immediately avenging Elena's death in a witch-like way, Sara waits for Eduardo to return home from a voyage with his former mistress/now wife, Deborah (Rosa Arenas) who (and this is important) didn't know that Eduardo was married to Elena at the time of their relationship and Sara knows this because the mirror told her. Instead of back at Eduardo, Sara's plan ends with Deborah horribly burned and considers this mission accomplished. However, Deborah is an innocent in all of this and is punished pretty horribly while Eduardo gets off pretty scott free. I almost thought the movie was going to end right there, but it didn't. Bizarrely, Sara's plan isn't so much witchy as it is a haunting. In fact, it feels more like Elena just came back from the dead on her own and started fucking with the lovebirds until they began yelling at each other (something about terror tears a couple apart) and freaking out.

But, what started as a witch movie and turned into a haunted house movie once again shifts into the mad scientist approach. Eduardo is obsessed with restoring his new brides skin to her so she doesn't have to be ashamed and embarks on a quest not unlike the one in Eyes Without a Face. Suddenly, Eduardo is a doctor (which has not been mentioned until now) and has a young man in his employ (whom we are just meeting) and there are police on the case (what case?). An entirely different movie starts halfway through The Witch's Mirror. Not only that, but they dig up a woman who is actually alive (a very common theme in the macabre) and has hands exactly like Elena's that Eduardo wants to put on Deborah. Why? Because... they're pretty? But he's tricked! And Sara hands removed from the still living corpse into the fire (because why save them to see if they can't be reattached to the original owner who could wake up at any moment with no hands) and has the undead Elena leave her hands instead. With these hands attached to Deborah, Elena can exact her own revenge. What the hell?

And you know, it's not a bad movie and not really confusing. But a million things happen in 75 minutes. I'm almost in awe of the accomplishments of director Chano Urueta. Anything related to witchery is totally superflous and it would take very little to have the film make sense just being a ghost story, but I kind of dug this little Mexican horror story.

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