Rent The Dark Mirror (1946)

Enjoyable thriller. - The Dark Mirror review by BC

Enjoyable thriller with many twists and turns. A fine performance from Olivia de Havilland playing a set of identical twins, one of whom is a murderer.

Compelling - The Dark Mirror review by sb

FILM & REVIEW Aka The Dark Mirror. Siodmak’s excellent psychological Noir - a respected doctor is found with a knife in his back and a young woman is seen leaving the apartment. She is identified as Terry Collins and two witnesses swear that they saw her that night - but she maintains she was in a park and has several other witnesses to confirm this . How could she be in two places at once ? The answer is revealed when the bedroom door opens and her identical twin sister Ruth comes out - both played by De Haviland. They stick to the alibi but although the detective Stevenson (Mitchell) is convinced one is the killer he can’t prove which one…..so the case collapses. He engages psychologist Scott [Ayers) to run Rorchard tests and begins to suspect that Terry is far more unstable than she first appears and deliberately falls in love with Ruth to see how Terry will react……. DeHaviland is superb in the dual lead - in public they appear identical but in private Terry is the dominant one and way she plays mind games on her weaker sister is quite chilling - so much so that you begin to be able to tell who is who just by a small gesture. Siodmak made several noir’s in the period and this is one of his best….4/5

Good twin/bad twin noir. - The Dark Mirror review by Steve

This is one of many film noirs made after WWII that deals with psychotherapy, and a smaller sub-genre that employs the good twin/bad twin motif. The schematic plot begins with a murder of a doctor. One of a pair of identical sisters (both Olivia de Havilland) is a suspect. Because neither will confess which one doesn't have an alibi, the police are checkmated.

So twin expert psychologist (Lew Ayres) gets involved. He falls in love with one sister, and diagnoses the other as a dangerous... schizophrenic! It's a screwy story, but fabulous entertainment, expertly photographed by Milton Krasner, who places the twins in the same frame which keeps the outré concept as realistic as possible.

The shots of the disturbed twin in the (dark) mirror are very effective. There aren't many shadows, I guess because they would have been difficult to match if the frame was subject to multiple exposure. It's still an atmospheric film though, with an exciting score by Dimitri Tiomkin. And no one can assemble a scene with the precision of Robert Siodmak.

Olivia came out of the war transformed as an actor, and she's very subtle as the divided twins, and the divided killer. It's the first of a trio of films for her playing a psychologically disturbed woman, followed by The Snake Pit (1948), and The Heiress (1949). Scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson would later return to the field with The Three Faces of Eve (1957). All these are fine films.