I have a love/hate relationship with the work of Andrei Tarkosvky.

For context, I’ve only seen three of his films, arguably his most relevant: Stalker, Andrei Rublev, and now Mirror. And - while I enjoyed watching each of them - by the time the credits roll, I’m always left with more questions than answers, a sort of hollowness that doesn’t subside until I inevitably hit the web for answers.

Eventually, I was forced to reconcile with a harrowing fact: That no matter how closely I study each frame, no matter how long I take to reflect on his dialogue, or how many times I rewind his endings, I’m a hopeless Tarkovsky analyst. And I’m not alone; try plugging in “Tarkosvky explained” into Youtube and witness for yourself the army of film school graduate-turned-vlogger types who want nothing more than to shove their graduation thesis on Stalker down your throat. The horror, the horror.

In a way, Tarkosvky’s movies are like a form of screen poetry. You can spend hours scrutinizing the cadence of each individual line, dissecting the couplets, scanning it all for some grand, life-affirming metaphor (or in the case Tarkosvky, un-affirming), but at the end of the day, the work is almost always experienced best as an undivided whole. If you really want to get analytical, sure, watch it a second time, but, in a way, the first pass should be appreciated from a distance. Such is the case with Mirror.

Mirror is many things. For starters, it’s a meditation on the effects of war on the family unit, drawing from Tarkovsky’s own life in a loosely-autobiographical fashion. As such, it’s also an ode to the women in his life, in particular his wife and mother. But if we’re getting philosophical, Mirror is a requiem for the fleeting nature of both time and memory, employing a broad, sweeping, non-linear narrative that spans multiple decades and perspectives.

I give myself a headache if I try and think about the themes and structure of Mirror for too long. But then again, this the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from watching Tarkovsky; he never was one for popcorn flicks. —Jackson Todd

““Never try to convey your idea to the audience - it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they’ll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.” ”

— Andrei Tarkosvky