The Empty Mirror
With Norman Rodway, Joel Grey, Camilla Soeberg.
US, 1996, 35mm, color, 118 min.
Detached from historical time, The Empty Mirror imagines a postwar Adolf Hitler holed up in an underground bunker, dictating his memoirs and confronting the demons of his own psyche. Through haunting images, Hitler encounters apparitions of his fiendish confidant, Joseph Goebbels; his enigmatic mistress, Eva Braun; the mastermind of his military campaigns, Hermann Goehring; Jewish psychologist Sigmund Freud; and the mysterious Woman In Black. Through stream-of-consciousness soliloquies and Hitler’s exchanges with his phantom guests, Hershey creates a terrifying primer on genius and psychosis, domination and destruction. As Variety’s Todd McCarthy noted, “For anyone willing to ponder the specifics of Hitler’s twisted mind and acts, there are elements here to engage the interest.”