Ah, The Other Side of the Mirror. Jess Franco’s attempt at Serious Cinema™—his moody, melancholic descent into psychological despair and surreal symbolism, except filtered through a lens smeared with coconut oil and desperation. You might go into this film expecting a gothic thriller, a twisted love story, or at the very least, a coherent narrative. What you get is a one-way ticket to FrancoLand: population you, 86 minutes of stilted wandering, and a mirror that reflects nothing but artistic confusion and a whole lot of eyeliner.
Released in 1973, this is Franco trying to wear his “I’m a real filmmaker” hat, trading in vampire lesbians and beachside bondage for dreamy visuals, tragic piano chords, and emotional collapse. It’s his Ingmar Bergman cosplay, and like most cosplay, it looks great from a distance and starts to fall apart the moment someone speaks.
The film stars Emma Cohen as Ana, a repressed young woman who witnesses her father’s suicide and immediately spirals into a vortex of grief, trauma, and Franco-ized psychosexual nonsense. She runs away to join a cabaret act, because apparently in Franco’s universe, emotional healing involves topless jazz routines and moody eroticism. As one does.
Ana falls in with a mysterious older man (played by Howard Vernon, looking like a dusty paperback copy of a forgotten French philosopher), and the two begin a relationship that is equal parts seduction and sleep paralysis. That’s the “plot.” But let’s not kid ourselves—this movie isn’t about story. It’s about Ana staring at mirrors, walking slowly through hallways, and Franco zooming into her face like he’s trying to crawl into her soul and take a nap.
The entire film unfolds like a dream sequence that forgot to wake up. Characters drift in and out of scenes without purpose. Dialogue is mumbled, whispered, or completely drowned out by mournful piano music that loops so often you’ll think your DVD player’s broken. Franco leans hard into atmosphere, which would be fine if the atmosphere didn’t feel like an elevator shaft filled with French perfume, cigarette smoke, and ennui.
The mirror in the title is both literal and metaphorical. Ana constantly stares into it, and so does the camera—because nothing says “psychological horror” like five minutes of a woman looking at herself and sighing while a saxophone wheezes like it’s dying from emphysema. Mirrors reflect. Mirrors distort. In this case, the mirror is mostly there to give Franco an excuse for more slow-motion nude shots disguised as introspection.
Emma Cohen, to her credit, gives a performance that suggests she was promised a different script—or at least a director who wasn’t hiding behind a fog machine and muttering about existential dread. She spends most of the movie nude, near-nude, or tragically under-lit. Her Ana is fragile, haunted, and constantly on the verge of crying, fainting, or both. If Cohen had any more melancholy, she’d need to be wrung out and dried.
Franco, for his part, shoots the entire film like he’s underwater. Everything is soft-focus and out-of-focus. Shadows flicker across faces. Rooms are lit like mausoleums. You get the sense that he watched Last Year at Marienbad and thought, “Yes, but with more nipples.”
There are long stretches with no dialogue—just Cohen walking in slow motion while Franco’s camera circles her like a vulture trying to find a good angle for regret. In one scene, Ana slowly undresses while staring into a mirror, and the scene goes on for so long it starts to feel like a hostage situation. She might be unraveling emotionally, but from the outside, it looks like a perfume ad directed by a sentient bottle of absinthe.
And then there’s the soundtrack. If you enjoy the sound of one lonely piano key being played over and over while a flute contemplates its existence, you’re in luck. The music is constant—oppressive, even. It doesn’t guide the emotion so much as beat you over the head with it. Every scene is scored like it’s the final five minutes of someone dying in a French novella. There’s no relief, no build, just endless, moody noodling that makes you want to drown your stereo in bathwater.
But the biggest problem with The Other Side of the Mirror is that it’s all mood and no momentum. Franco sets the tone early—dreamy, tragic, vaguely erotic—and never shifts gears. There’s no tension. No sense of escalation. Just Ana’s slow descent into nothingness, padded with softcore flashbacks, meandering monologues, and mirrors. So many mirrors. At some point, you begin to suspect Franco was just fascinated with reflective surfaces and forgot to write a second act.
And let’s not forget the men in the film. They’re all manipulative, predatory, or so bland they might be literal figments of Ana’s imagination. The romance is never romantic. The sex is never sexy. Every interaction feels transactional, hollow, and just a little sleazy. It’s not transgressive—it’s tired. Franco’s idea of emotional complexity is to zoom into someone’s eye while sad music plays. Subtlety is not part of the equation.
The film ends—not with a bang, not even a whimper, but with a slow pan, a wistful look, and another piano note that sounds like it’s about to die of loneliness. There’s no catharsis. No climax. Just the same lingering sense of Why am I watching this? that has plagued you since the 20-minute mark.
Final Verdict:
The Other Side of the Mirror is Jess Franco trying to be deep, serious, and poetic—and tripping over his own ascot in the process. It’s not horror. It’s not erotic. It’s not even particularly interesting. It’s just Franco staring into a mirror of his own pretensions and mistaking fog for brilliance.
Watch it only if you enjoy scenes of women walking slowly through corridors, mirrors that symbolize absolutely everything and nothing, and a soundtrack that wants to make you cry without giving you a reason. Otherwise, leave this mirror unshattered. What’s on the other side is just more Franco, sleepwalking through another film with his fly halfway open and his artistic ambitions dragging behind him like a forgotten bathrobe.
