Alexandre Aja's 'Mirrors' Failure Spells the Demise of 'Torture Porn'...Yeah, Right

With its mediocre $11 million opening weekend box office take, the unequivocal failure of Mirrors, Alexandre Aja's critical (20 percent on [Rotten Tomatoes] and a 36 on [Metacritic]( http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/mirrors#critics/)) and financial bomb, may be cause for celebration. It spells the beginning of the end of what the New York magazine's David Edelstein dubbed the ["torture porn"](http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/) craze, where "explicit scenes of torture and mutilation...now...have terrific production values and a place of honor in your local multiplex." Its paradoxically gory and glitzy-haunting of a dilapidated department store never looked more difficult to pull off. But big-budget Mirrors' high production values can't mask its tediously unimaginative dialogue, ludicrous plot and heretical lack of imaginative death scenes (the real reason people go to Aja's films). What makes Mirrors such a blow against the poorly defined movement (Edelstein never draws a correlation between the 42nd Street theater flicks that he cites as torture porn's predecessors, refusing to acknowledge that the movement is just a more visible collective monster) is that it's Aja's second big-budget outing and his first major failure.

After his seriously flawed but impressive High Tension put him on the map in 2003, Aja went from being a fanboy fave to a serious moneymaker when his creatively stillborn 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes [grossed $41.78 million domestically]. Though Aja's Hills didn't add anything substantive to Wes Craven's original film—in fact, at times it feels like a shot-for-shot remake—it also didn't sport any political pretensions like Eli Roth's Hostel—torture porn's critics favorite piñata—its financial success proved that "torture porn" was a moneymaker.

Today, Mirrors, a remake of Sung-ho Kim's 2003 Into the Mirror, bombs, and it looks like the moral panic may be subsiding. Though Aja wrangled good guy Kiefer Sutherland into starring as a security guard haunted by the demons that possessed a schizophrenic mental patient-turned-nun, the people and the critics have spoken (in that order) and deemed Mirrors to be nothing more than a financially unsuccessful and imaginatively lame turd. For now, the multiplex is safe from the menace of "torture porn"...until [David Hackl's Saw V] comes out and rakes in the sadistic and gullible masses' money.