James Lafferty

While using every horror movie cliche in the book, this film cleverly tells a bracingly original story that will have genre fans squirming in their seats. It's rare that a movie can actually scare us anymore, and while this one is a bit over-serious, it playfully twists old tricks to confound expectations.

The story centres on a brother and sister: 21-year-old Tim (Brenton Thwaites) has just been collected by his big sister Kaylie (Karen Gillan) after spending 10 years in a psychiatric hospital. She tells him that they only have a few days to make good the promise they made a decade ago: to destroy a mirror that they believe caused the unexplained violent deaths of their parents (Katee Sackhoff and Rory Cochrane). Kaylie has everything ready, including cameras to capture the truth about this evil mirror and a fail-safe plan to destroy it before it can lure them into its murderous clutches.

The film inventively flickers back and forth in time between the present day and the fateful earlier events, when the parents and siblings (played as children by Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan Ewald) have their own freaky encounter with this enormous gothic mirror. In both timelines, plants wither, pets go nuts and strange figures are glimpsed in the shadows. But the mirror's most dangerous trick is to fracture reality, and now past and present seem to be merging for Tom and Kaylie. Director-cowriter Mike Flanagan fluidly weaves together both timelines in eye-catching ways, continually shifting the emotional tone as well, just to keep us off balance.

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It's been seven years since the events involving Samantha Darko (Daveigh Chase, reprising her role from the original film) and her family, including big brother Donnie, played out. Now 18, she decides to join her best friend Corey (Briana Evigan) on a road trip to California. There, Sam hopes to become a professional dancer. Unfortunately, their car breaks down outside a one-horse town in the middle of Utah. While they wait for replacement parts, the girls meet up with local rebel Randy (Ed Westwick), crazed preacher John Mellit (Matthew Davis), and equally fanatical parishioner Trudy Potter (Elizabeth Berkley). When a meteor hits the tiny burg late one night, it sets into motion a chain of events that has Samantha having horrific visions of the end of the world. It's a fate she shares with a Gulf War veteran (James Lafferty) who is convinced that Armageddon will occur on July 4, 1995.

Continue reading: S. Darko Review