SYNOPSIS
The film takes place in two different times: the present and 11 years earlier. The two plot lines are told in parallel through flashbacks with many cuts occurring between corresponding actions in each time frame. In 2002, software engineer Alan Russell moves into a new house with his wife Marie, 10-year-old son Tim, and 12-year-old daughter Kaylie. Alan purchases an antique mirror to decorate his office. Unbeknownst to them, the mirror supernaturally induces hallucinations. Marie is haunted by visions of her own body decaying, while Alan is seduced by a ghostly woman named Marisol, who has mirrors in place of eyes.
Over time, the parents become psychotic; Alan increasingly isolates himself in his office, and Marie becomes withdrawn and paranoid. All of the plants in the house die, and the family dog disappears after being shut in the office with the mirror. After Kaylie sees Alan with Marisol, she tells her mother, and the parents fight. One night, Marie sees her reflection in the mirror, and sees herself bleeding from an old scar. She goes insane and attempts to kill her children, but Alan overpowers her and locks her away, telling the children that she is unwell. When the family runs out of food, the children realize that their father is under the influence of the mirror, so Kaylie goes to seek help from their mother, and finds her chained to the wall and acting like an animal. Kaylie and Tim try going to their neighbors for help, but the neighbors disbelieve their stories. When Kaylie attempts to use the phone, she discovers that all of her phone calls are answered by the same man.
One night, Alan unchains Marie, and both parents attack the children. Marie briefly comes to her senses, only to be shot dead by Alan. The children try to destroy the mirror with golf clubs, but the mirror tricks them, making them believe they are hitting the mirror when they are actually hitting the wall. Alan corners the children in his office, but also experiences a moment of lucidity. He kills himself by taking the gun Tim is pointing at him and forcing Tim's finger against the trigger. Before dying, he begs the children to run, but Marisol and various other victims of the mirror appear as horrific ghosts. The police arrive and take Tim into custody. Before the siblings are separated, they promise to reunite as adults and destroy the mirror. As Tim is taken away in the back of a squad car, he sees the ghosts of his parents watching him from the house.
Eleven years later, Tim is discharged from a psychiatric hospital, having come to believe that there were no supernatural events involved in his parents' deaths. Kaylie, meanwhile, has spent most of her young adulthood researching the history of the mirror. Using her position as an employee of an auction house, Kaylie obtains access to the mirror and has it transported to the family home, where she places it in a room filled with surveillance cameras and a "kill switch" — an anchor weighted to the ceiling and set to a timer. Kaylie intends to destroy the mirror, but first wants to document its powers, proving Tim's innocence.
After Kaylie presents her research about deaths associated with the presence of the mirror, Tim attempts to convince her that she's mistaking correlation with causation in an attempt to blame their parents' deaths on a supernatural force. The siblings argue, and while perceiving no gaps in their conversation, they notice the houseplants begin to wilt. Upon reviewing the camera footage, they see themselves performing actions they have no memory of. Tim finally accepts that the mirror has some diabolical power and attempts to escape the house with Kaylie, only for the pair to be repeatedly drawn back by the mirror's influence. They try to call the police, but they are only able to reach the same voice who spoke to them on the phone as children. Seeing a hallucination of her deceased mother, Kaylie stabs it in the neck with a plate shard, only to then realize that she has stabbed her fiancé. Kaylie is convinced that she is suffering another hallucination, because she is unable to see the plate shards through her phone camera: no plate implies no stabbing. However, when she looks at the corpse through her phone camera, she continues to see her fiance, and is then convinced that she has killed him. Tim finally activates the kill switch, only realizing after the anchor has descended that Kaylie stood in its path, and he has killed her. The police arrive and arrest a hysterical Tim, just as they arrested him when he was younger. As both a boy and an adult, Tim claims the mirror is responsible. As he is taken away, the older Tim sees Kaylie's ghost standing in the house with his parents.
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