MirrorMask

MIRRORMASK. Hmm.

Dave McKean’s unsettling ‘Sandman’ covers got me interested in this picture. What would an entire film made with McKean’s sensibility look like? Well, I’m here to tell you that it would look like a moving ‘Sandman’ cover.

Unfortunately, McKean’s vision is about all this film has going for it. MIRRORMASK is a rather conventional quest tale, set in a land very much like the Dreaming, that spends all of its time looking fantastical and spends very little time creating people we care about and giving them urgent, interesting things to do.

But hey, this is a PG movie and it’s essentially a kids’ story, so it must be ok to share with the little ones, right? Wrong. My youngest started crying about three minutes in, and I’m glad I saw the rest of the film alone. Many of McKean’s visions are nightmare-inducing, and I just don’t need to wake up to screaming children in the middle of the night.

So, there it is. Scary and rather dull, MIRRORMASK is a film I could have done without.