Mirror

Mirror (Zerkalo, 1975) is the Andrei Tarkovsky drama you can watch online on iFILM, and it remains the most personal thing he ever filmed. A dying man drifts back through his own life — his mother, the war years, a wooden house in the countryside, the women he loved and lost.

Forget plot in the usual sense. The film moves the way memory does: dreams bleed into newsreel footage, the director's father Arseny Tarkovsky reads his own poems on the soundtrack, and Margarita Terekhova plays both the narrator's mother and his wife, so you blur them exactly as he does. Innokenty Smoktunovsky lends the unseen narrator's voice; Oleg Yankovsky and Anatoly Solonitsyn pass through. The camera lingers on rain crossing a tabletop, on wind bending a field of grass.

Tarkovsky re-edited this one more than twenty times, and you can feel how hard it fought him. Don't come looking for answers — come for the sensation of someone else's recollection surfacing as your own. Stream Mirror (1975) online on iFILM, ideally late and undisturbed.