E-Mail This Article to a Friend MIRRORMASK

101 MINUTES | KENDALL SQUARE

Awash in a sea of visual quotations from Salvador Dalí to Stanley Kubrick, Dave McKean’s fantasy film begins deliciously weird before mutating into a BBC after-school special. Helena (Stephanie Leonidas), the glum teenage daughter of circus performers, decides she wants to leave the big top and lead a conventional life. Her mother then falls ill, and Helena spends the remainder of the film working through her anxieties in an allegorical dreamscape where she must reconcile opposing kingdoms and combat the alter egos of her family members. The art direction and the special effects impress, and Leonidas charms, but it’s all spectacular punctuation to a banal narrative.