Mirror Moves

Maggie just found out that her husband is a serial killer. Mirror Moves turns her reckoning into an experiment in form: Godard's formal playfulness rerouted through a surreal American deadpan.

Fifteen years in, a woman discovers her husband is a serial killer. The realization splinters her sense of self as she turns the question inward: how much did she know, if only subconsciously, what could she have prevented, and what part of her was drawn to his darkness? Mirror Moves renders that reckoning not as a thriller but as a surreal non-narrative work in twelve parts.

Built as a sequence of formal meta-movements rather than a standard plot, Mirror Moves works by accumulation: motifs return altered, gestures rhyme across the runtime, and comedy surfaces where the form seems most severe. Its lineage is the essayistic European avant-garde — Godard, Resnais, et al. — but its temperament is unmistakably American: dry, restless, and unwilling to pander. It carries a novelist's attention to structure to a medium that rewards but rarely courts it.

"The salient fact about any creative action, including the simple act of communicating with another human being, is that it has no motive. You might think you have a motive, but you're just acting out a passion play that was tired before words were invented, before the painted Paleolithic bulls on the walls of Lascaux were dry, before some dope dropped from the trees in the savannah looking for lower-hanging fruit. My larger point is that you, you personally, are guilty of every crime that's been committed or will be committed by any single member of the human race. No one is innocent, no infant or elderly saint. The world's bad guys are you. You, yourself, are a terrible person. You are without ruth. I can tell that to your face, but it's still just words, words, words. When you've reached the limit of words, or what words can do, the only thing left is to shut up in some final way."

James Greer is a novelist and screenwriter. He co-wrote Steven Soderbergh's Unsane (2018) and is the author of the novels Bad Eminence, The Failure, and Artificial Light — two of which return to print in 2027, alongside the French edition of Bad Eminence. Mirror Moves is his first feature film. More at Artificial Light and North of Onhava.

• Beth Lisick — Maggie
• Hannah Cohen — Violet
• Austin Vaughn — Malcolm
• Cecilia Corrigan — Detective Sarah Sullivan
• Keenan O'Meara — Detective Will Potts

• Written & Directed by James Greer
• Producers: Brian Joseph Davis, Laura MacDonald, Beth Lisick
• Line Producer: Laura MacDonald
• Associate Producer: Sophie Simpson
• Cinematography: Brian Joseph Davis
• Editor: Thomas Early
• Associate Editor: Jesse Parker Hart
• Original Music: Lola G.
• Art Direction: Leann Murphy
• Sound: Gaston Ezequiel Martinez Acosta
• Post-Production Supervisor: Sven Transvoort
• VFX: Duolin Ge
• Colorist: Roy Sun
• Sound Design / Re-recording Mixer: Eli Crews
• Cinematic Void: James Branscome

• Outstanding Achievement Award, Best Experimental Film — Black Swan International Film Festival, 2023
• Outstanding Achievement Award, Best Experimental Film — Cult Critic Movie Awards, 2023
• Best Horror/Thriller — Philadelphia Independent Film Festival, 2023
• Best First Time Filmmaker — Philadelphia Independent Film Festival, 2023
• Official Selection — The IndieFest Film Awards, 2023
• Nominated, Best Experimental Feature — Art Film Spirit Awards, 2023
• Nominee — Montreal Independent Film Festival

Screener available on request from press@mirrormoves.org.

Steven Soderbergh: "I love this kind of thing!"

High-resolution stills, poster, and trailer available on request from press@mirrormoves.org.