Mirrors

Directed by Alexandre Aja. Starring Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Cameron Boyce, Erica Gluck, Amy Smart, Mary Beth Peil 18 cert, gen release, 110 min

ALEXANDRE Aja, director of the excellent Switchblade Romance, the passable Hills Have Eyesremake and this largely useless shambles, can, at least, congratulate himself on one notable achievement.

Mirrors, in which Kiefer Sutherland is terrorised by silver- backed sheets of glass, somehow manages to be even more bewildering than the Korean film that inspired it. Kim Sung-ho's Into the Mirrortook as long as 30 minutes to spin off the highway of coherence and into the forest of confusion. Mirrorsmanages that feat in about half the time.

Laden with unnecessary back- story and fruitless exposition, the film casts Sutherland as a former New York police officer now working as a security guard at an abandoned department store. The huge building, which was engulfed by fire some years previously, now contains piles of heaped ash, more than a few charred mannequins and a great many (argh!) mirrors.

One evening, Kiefer, who has been on the wrong end of the bottle recently, spies something creepy in the looking glass and begins a descent into paranoia and hysteria. His family believe him to be crazy. The audience suspect he is the victim of some sort of supernatural possession that will be explained satisfactorily in the final reel. Sadly, we are all wrong.

As well as being a staggering waste of celluloid and a sustained exercise in creative incoherence, Mirrorscould be viewed an insanely lengthy riff on that gag in Duck Soup, which sees Groucho's reflection takes on an independent identity. Sadly, the effect wears thin quickly and no amount of nonsensical running around and shouting - "Get away from the mirror!" - can make up for the fact that the writers can't make sense of their own story.

Still, I suppose we should be grateful that Nicolae Ceausescu's Academy of Sciences building in Bucharest, which provides many of the spooky interiors, is now being used for such relatively harmless ends. Fake horror - even when as dull as this - is always preferable to the real thing.