Behind the Mirror is a compelling story about a good man who always tries to do the right thing, even as he descends into madness.
Written by Nicolas D. Sampson and directed by Minos Papas, Behind the Mirror follows traumatized writer Xavier (Matt Hopkins), who has just been forced to relocate to a small town with his wife Sandra (Daniela Mastropietro) and their two small children. Xavier is a good father, who really appreciates the outdoors and tries to share his love of nature with his kids. He is generally good-spirited, but struggles to fit in with small-town life. He has many different conflicts with the locals, but the most common one is related to construction on the waterfront. He feels like the only good thing about the town is the natural beauty, and that is being destroyed in the name of commercialism.
Xavier feels like a total outcast until he makes a friend in a traveling shaman named James (Nando Del Castillo). James convinces Xavier to come on a trip with him for a life-changing experience. They go to a cabin deep in the woods and drink hallucinogenic tea, and that’s when things begin to go horribly wrong. Xavier begins to see a shadow figure version of himself, which seems to feed on his primal urges and do bad things in the name of righteousness. Slowly, Xavier begins to lose control of his actions as well as his grip on reality. Everyone turns against him, and the isolation drives him further into madness. As we reach the climax, the story takes an unexpected and very dark turn which I really enjoyed.
The performances delivered by Hopkins and Castillo were top-notch, and the supporting cast was very solid. The film was beautiful, featuring breathtaking shots of nature as well as some interesting effects to enhance the hallucinations and madness. The score was haunting and intense and did much to put me at ease before throwing me into the chaos.
Personally, I enjoyed this film quite a bit. I am a huge fan of watching ordinary people lose their minds and that was well-executed in Behind the Mirror. If you enjoy the same, you will like this film.
Behind the Mirror is distributed by THE ORCHARD / RANDOM MEDIA and is available on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, X-Box, VUDU, Comcast, Sky-UK, and more VOD platforms. For more information, visit www.behindthemirror.com.
I felt that I had to get a comment down somewhere in public. I watched this film by accident, thinking that it was going to be a horror film. But although it was not such, it was crammed with the stuff that I am always looking for in horror films and which is the reason that horror is my favourite genre. It was a story of the Herman Hesse sorte, with an adult hero coming into a catastrophic flowering of his self realization as freshly rediscovered soul collides with his destiny, to borrow some words from TS Eliot’s Little Gidding ‘ A condition of complete simplicity, consting not less than everything ‘ Like the victim of a ‘ Judo attack ‘ Xavier is woven an ambush, unique and for him alone and at the same time he is primed and set up for it in a way that could only be accomplished in its perfection by one man only. Apart from anything else, it was a story with logically interconnecting parts. It was a thing of beauty and something like that could never be one of the most famous: it’s too individual and much the same could be said of ‘ Steppenwolf ‘