Honestly, if you ask three different people what The Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky is about, you’ll get four different answers. One person will tell you it’s a history of the Soviet Union. Another will swear it’s a dying man’s fever dream. The third will just look at you, look at the wall, and start crying because of a specific shot of a barn burning in the rain.
It’s that kind of movie.
Released in 1975, Zerkalo (the original Russian title) didn't just break the rules of cinema; it acted like those rules never existed in the first place. There’s no "plot" in the way we usually think about it. No inciting incident. No three-act structure. Just a rushing stream of memories, newsreels, and poems. It’s basically a soul laid bare on celluloid.
What is The Mirror actually doing?
The film is loosely—and I mean painfully—autobiographical. Tarkovsky wasn't interested in a "Best Of" reel of his life. Instead, he wanted to capture the texture of memory. You know how when you remember your childhood, you don't see a movie? You see a specific flash of light on a table, or you smell the rain on a dusty path. That’s what this is.
The "story," if we have to call it that, centers on a dying poet named Aleksei. We never really see his face as an adult. We just hear his voice (which belongs to actor Innokenty Smoktunovsky) and see the world through his failing eyes. He’s looking back at three distinct chunks of time:
👉 See also: Questions From Black Card Revoked: The Culture Test That Might Just Get You Roasted
- The pre-war 1930s at a rural dacha (summer house).
- The brutal years of World War II.
- The "present" day of the 1970s, where his own life is falling apart.
One thing that trips people up is the casting. Margarita Terekhova plays both Aleksei’s mother in the past and his ex-wife in the present. It’s a genius move. It shows how we often marry people who remind us of our parents, or how we’re doomed to repeat the same emotional mistakes.
The struggle to get it made
You’ve got to remember that Tarkovsky was working under the Soviet Goskino system. These guys wanted "Socialist Realism." They wanted movies about brave soldiers and happy factory workers. Tarkovsky handed them a non-linear poem about a guy feeling guilty about his mom.
The head of Goskino, Filipp Ermash, was not a fan. He called it "incomprehensible" and "elitist." The film was given a low category rating, which meant it only got a tiny release in the USSR. But something weird happened. Even though the critics hated it, ordinary people wrote Tarkovsky thousands of letters. They told him, "This is my life. How did you know?"
One worker wrote to him saying they had seen it and finally understood why they felt so lonely. That’s the power of The Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky. It bypassed the brain and went straight for the nervous system.
✨ Don't miss: The Reality of Sex Movies From Africa: Censorship, Nollywood, and the Digital Underground
Facts that sound fake but aren't
- The Dacha: Tarkovsky didn't just find a house that looked like his childhood home. He found the original foundations in the village of Ignatievo and rebuilt the house exactly as it was.
- The Buckwheat: He insisted the local farmers plant buckwheat in the fields because he remembered it blooming when he was a kid. It hadn't been grown there for decades.
- The Poetry: The voice you hear reading those haunting poems? That’s Arseny Tarkovsky, Andrei’s actual father. The poems are real, and the pain in the voice is real.
Why it’s so hard to look away
There is a sequence in the middle of the film that uses newsreel footage. It’s not just "history." It’s a montage of Soviet soldiers dragging heavy equipment through the mud of Lake Sivash during WWII. It goes on and on. It’s exhausting to watch.
Why put that in a movie about a guy's childhood? Because Tarkovsky believed our personal memories are inseparable from the "memory" of our country. Your mom washing her hair is just as much a part of "history" as the Spanish Civil War or the first hot air balloon flight.
The cinematography by Georgy Rerberg is almost supernatural. They switch between lush color, crisp black-and-white, and a weird, ghostly sepia. It feels like the film itself is aging and de-aging before your eyes.
Common misconceptions (What people get wrong)
A lot of people think The Mirror is just "random." It’s not. It’s actually incredibly precise. Tarkovsky reportedly edited the film over 20 different ways before he found the one that worked. If you move one scene, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.
🔗 Read more: Alfonso Cuarón: Why the Harry Potter 3 Director Changed the Wizarding World Forever
Another myth: you need a PhD in Russian history to "get" it.
Nah.
Honestly, you just need to have loved someone and felt bad about it. You need to have missed your parents. You need to have looked at a rainy window and felt a sudden, sharp pang of nostalgia for a place you can’t go back to.
How to actually watch it
If you try to "figure it out" while watching, you’re going to have a bad time. You’ll get frustrated. You’ll wonder why there’s a kid being cured of a stutter at the beginning (that's a prologue about the power of speech, by the way).
The Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky is a movie you experience, not one you solve.
- Turn off your phone. Seriously.
- Dim the lights.
- Don't worry about who is who.
- Just watch the wind move through the grass.
It’s been fifty years, and we still don't have another film like it. It remains the ultimate "dividing line" for cinephiles. You’re either the person who thinks it’s a pretentious mess, or you’re the person who realizes that, for 108 minutes, you weren't watching a screen—you were looking into your own soul.
Next Steps for the Tarkovsky Curious:
If you’ve already seen The Mirror and your brain is buzzing, your next move should be to read Tarkovsky’s own book, Sculpting in Time. He explains his theory of "poetic links" and why he hated traditional montage. It’s the best way to understand why the film feels so different from everything else. Also, check out the 2021 Criterion Collection restoration; the colors are finally as vivid as Tarkovsky intended them to be back in '75.