“I can’t wait to see this dream in which I’ll be a child again and feel happy again because everything will still be ahead, everything will be possible…”

The final sequence of Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky’s most experimental film, is emotionally devastating.

“Do you want a boy or a girl?” the main character’s Father asks his pregnant wife as he lays with her in a field outside of their rural cabin. She sits up and smiles, then looks away from him as she fights back tears. Tarkovsky zooms into a close-up of her face; we see a quivering, anxious sigh escape her lips — but her husband does not. Her silence, body language, and tears tell us the answer that she would never say aloud: neither.

A choir erupts into dramatic song on the soundtrack as Tarkovsky cuts to a shot of trees; the camera tracks to the left to reveal the Mother, now much older, standing in a field beside the two young children she raised long ago. The choir continues to chant as Tarkovsky intercuts footage of nature with vignettes of the elderly Mother guiding her young children through the field. As the Mother and the children reach the foreground of the frame in the final shot, the camera dollies back to reveal that the younger Mother is watching them from afar.

The sun sets on the horizon as the camera dollies further back into a dark forest of trees and the elderly Mother accompanies her children into the distance.

With all of the context provided throughout Mirror‘s nonlinear narrative, those final moments are extraordinarily poignant.

In many sequences throughout the film, the camera places us directly in the point of view of the adult Aleksei, the young boy in this scene. We never see the adult Aleksei (save an obscured shot of him dying in bed near the end of the film); we merely see the world through his eyes.

In one sequence, Aleksei talks to his mother on the phone; we hear their conversation as narration while the camera glides — presumably from his point of view — ever so slowly through the rooms and hallways of his apartment. “Mom, why do we have to fight all the time? I’m sorry if I did anything wrong,” he says solemnly. The camera continues gliding a window shrouded in curtains. His mother does not reply. We hear the phone’s busy signal on the soundtrack. The film moves on to a new scene.

The camera-as-Aleksei formal device later makes us intimately involved in two arguments between Aleksei and his wife — one of which takes place in the film’s present and is presented in full color, the other in the film’s past, presented in sepia tone.

“I always said that you resemble my mother,” Aleksei says at the start of the first of these scenes. She does.

“Apparently, that’s the reason we divorced,” she tartly replies. “I notice with horror how much Ignat,” their son, “is becoming like you.” She continues to spite him while admiring herself in a mirror. “You only know how to demand.”

This harsh insult echoes a similar gibe leveraged at Aleksei’s Mother in the previous flashback. In that scene, Aleksei’s Mother causes a panic in the printing press assembly line by incorrectly and frantically convincing others that there could have been a misprint in an important edition of the paper that her colleagues spent all night printing. At the end of this scene, her coworker cruelly condemns her behavior, saying that “all her life,” all she did is beg others to do things for her — concluding her verbal attacks with, “Have you ever admitted you were wrong? Never.” Tears swell in Aleksei’s Mother’s eyes. She leaves the room, distraught.

The aforementioned confrontations work together to communicate the idea that toxic characteristics can be unwittingly passed from generation to generation for reasons that often elude those committing the emotional transgressions — and that the present often mirrors the past until it is recognized and cycles are broken.

Mirror cuts between footage of Aleksei’s present, vignettes of his and his Mother’s memories, and archival documentary reels of events (like World War II) that took place during Aleksei’s life. The documentary footage provides context for the societal events that shaped the man Aleksei became. The flashbacks draw parallels between Aleksei’s past, present, and future (as represented by his son, Ignat). Together, these fragments of stories inform us as to why, at the end of Aleksei’s life, he feels so emotionally fragmented and lost.

The scenes of war — some comprised of documentary footage, others flashback scenes featuring Aleksei training for battle in the cold, snow-covered shooting range of a military academy — exemplify the notion that societal violence and chaos causes instability and anxiety, which then destroys the innocence of children, stunting their emotional growth and maturity.

Tarkovsky weaves these personal and historical scenes together poetically; the nonlinear edit steers us through time and memory freely. It is not until the culmination of it all — that devastating final sequence — that the pieces fully connect.

Only after we’ve seen Aleksei’s childhood, the dissolution of his marriage, the effects of war on his generation’s youth, and his Mother’s best attempts — and failures — to be a single parent does her melancholic silence in response to “do you want a boy or a girl?” speak volumes.

With all of that context, witnessing his Mother envision how she would take care of her children differently with the wisdom and perspective of old age is haunting.

The narrative structure of Mirror may be nonlinear, but context and information is always given to us at exactly the right time for clear emotional understanding.

Mirror‘s narrative is more fragmented than traditional movies — even when compared to other Tarkovsky films — and its pace is generally faster than the rest of his oeuvre. But Tarkovsky gives us moments throughout the film to process and make sense of these fragments by lingering on visual metaphors.

At first, they metaphors are subtle — the fields swaying haphazardly in a hard breeze, for example, as the Mother’s visitor (and potential future lover) looks back at her after their chance first meeting.

Other visual metaphors are much more aesthetically dramatic. Soon after the Mother meets this man, Tarkovsky reveals that the cabin behind Aleksei’s childhood home is on fire — an overt representation of the Mother and Father’s divorce causing their home to go down in flames. We first see the blaze flickering in the distance in a shot framed within a mirror inside of the house, with the focus on young Aleksei and his sister staring at the fire through their back door. Then, the camera slowly glides through their home and out of the door to dramatically frame the burning structure from within the family’s back porch. Rain drips from the porch roof as the family solemnly contemplates the destruction.

In a later scene, we see Ignat illegally burning something outside of an apartment building while his parents quarrel inside. This moment harkens back to this earlier scene — indicating that this family has an intergenerational propensity for destruction.

Some scenes, at first glance, feel out of place in the larger narrative — but upon closer inspection, it is clear that they are included to certify that the themes that Tarkovsky is exploring are not unique to the specific family at the center of this story. Take, for example, the scene in which the young, redheaded, teenage woman dances freely — and then is coldly interrupted as her father cruelly slaps her across the face for it. As Aleksei’s absent parents damaged him, so too will her abusive parent damage her.

By cutting back and forth between old and young versions of the same characters — and historical documentary footage — throughout Mirror, Tarkovsky forces us to witness these kinds of moments fleetingly. There is a sense that builds through the winding storytelling that our lives are short, and all of our choices — good and bad — are small in the grand scheme of time.

In one particularly abstract scene, a mysterious older woman sits at a parlor table stirring a mug of tea while Ignat recites a letter about Russia. The woman becomes increasingly distracted. Soon, she vanishes from the room, leaving Ignat confused and alone. Tarkovsky cuts to a detail shot of the table, where only a single fingerprint remains. The fingerprint rapidly shrinks until it fully disappears… as if to say that time erases all traces of us from the places we once were.

So why torture ourselves? Tarkovsky seems to ask. But then he answers his own question, through mixed media montages about historical turmoil and intergenerational trauma.

And as we take in the abstract imagery, and listen to the dramatic music and poetic recitations that accompany it, we feel their pain.