I spent so much of it with my eyes closed I feel hardly qualified to write about this film. Some of the rest of the time I was looking through a handkerchief, which at least blurred the images. On second thoughts, though, my terror confirms it does what it sets out to do: really scare the audience. In any case, I can definitely confirm that the sound track was excellent.

You’d think as my 'Horror' is one of my favourite genres I’d have nerves of steel and remain unfazed by whatever’s happening onscreen. The opposite is true, really. My nerves get worse as I get older.

The director’s game-plan seems to have been to scare his audience witless at the start then keep up the pressure. In the opening scene, which seems like one long take, a bald-headed, man, his eyes popping with fear, is pursued by some nameless horror along a series of underground tunnels. He arrives at a dead end, confronted by a looming mirror-fronted cupboard, with an aisle flanked by lockers. The locker doors swing open by one. Each has a mirror on the inside so the man’s wide-eyed fear is multiplied. He throws himself to the ground, begging for his life and repeating over and over that he’s sorry. In front of him the mirrored front breaks and falls into shards. I won’t tell you what happens next, but it’s horrible.Even through a handkerchief.

So far so scary. Thank goodness, in the next scene it’s daylight and a drowsy Keifer Sutherland rises from a sofa bed and crushes a pill in a bathroom, then adds it to water, looking into the mirror above the sink. I’m already expecting the worst, but no, he bids farewell to his sister on whose couch he’s sleeping, and goes off into the reassuringly brightly-lit New York Streets. Sutherland plays Ben Carson, an ex-cop who shot his partner and is suspended from duty pending enquiries, as we know from in a newspaper cutting in the room. .

From the street he gains access to what looks like a building site but is in fact an area on which stands an enormous burnt-out department store, called the Mayflower. He reports for a tour by the daytime caretaker before he starts his new job as night watchman. He’ll have to patrol every three hours, says the day-time guy, flashing his torch around the cavernous interior, stocked with eery statuary and giant mirrors glinting in the grey light cast from an atrium hundreds of feet overhead. Startled birds make flurrying sounds as they cross the vast space, further unnerving the viewer.

Ben is fighting alcoholism brought on after his suspension, hence the medication, and he wants to prove asap to his wife that he’s worthy to come back and be a father to the their two kids. Also he needs the money. At first he thinks he’s hallucinating when he sees bizarre and even dangerous reflections, which attack him. Soon his family are being subjected to similar treatment by reflections in the family home and his sister is violently killed in the bath in one of the most horrific scenes I’ve seen in a long time. The director wrong-foots the audience for that one, with a fairly matter of fact build-up so by the time you need to look away you are too appalled to do so.

Ben must solve the mystery of what’s behind the mirrors, using his old police contacts and actually going out to search for a missing inhabitant from the mental asylum that adjoined the store. The trip to the broken down old farm with its rednecks and ferocious dog was a pleasant interval, as was the journey to a hillside monastery which could have been air-lifted from Tuscany.

The acting was all quite adequate, but the star of the film is the department store set, and the mirrors themselves, whose bendy surfaces recall all the mirror-horror films you've ever seen. The stores’ maze-like basement with its burst water pipes just adds to the menace. Behind every shiny surface in this movie’s world lurks some kind of demonic threat and the release of water just increases the possibility of reflection. Even shiny doorknobs are a threat. It all comes to a magnificent climax in the house, with Ben’s wife and kids threatened by demons who take possession of the boy, making him turn on the taps. In one amazing scene the boy is sucked into a pool on the parquet whilst his helpless mother looks on.

In the film, the everyday world contrasts with a hidden one of evil, and the store’s name, ‘Mayflower’ suggests it's a metaphor for American society. Instead of being just another film about Americans threatened by outside forces, to be challenged and defeated, an unusual ending suggests an alternative meaning. What surprised me most that this was a ‘Certificate 15’ film. I concluded that after all young people may be tougher these days. However, a group of teenage girls in the toilets were discussing the same point, so I'm not alone in finding the film unusually frightening.