The film features Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, Alla Demidova, Anatoly Solonitsyn, Tarkovsky's wife Larisa Tarkovskaya, and his mother Maria Vishnyakova.

Innokenty Smoktunovsky contributed voiceover dialogue and Eduard Artemyev composed incidental music and sound effects.

It is loosely autobiographical, unconventionally structured, and draws on a wide variety of source material, including newsreel footage of major moments in Soviet history and the poetry of the director's father, Arseny Tarkovsky.

The film's loose flow of oneiric images has been compared with the stream of consciousness technique associated with modernist literature.

Many viewers found its narrative incomprehensible, although Tarkovsky noted that many non-film critics understood the film.

[6][7]: 9–13 Mirror depicts the thoughts, emotions and memories of Aleksei,[b] a Soviet poet, as a child, adolescent, and 40-year-old.

[7]: 29 Tarkovsky structured the film as a series of memories Aleksei ponders, saying that "the episodes the narrator remembers at an extreme moment of crisis cause him pain up to the last minute, [and] fill him with sorrow and anxiety.

[8] Scenes are connected not by time or place, but by particular individuals and motifs that serendipitously come to mind, such as a book that Aleksei once read during an important moment, or a background character mentioned during a phone call.

The film encourages viewers to embrace its nonlinear, seemingly illogical narrative by including an opening scene in which a physician examines a man with a stutter.

Before the Great Patriotic War (1941-45), Aleksei's mother, Maria,[c] lives with her children in a plain countryside dacha.

In the present day (1960s/70s), after the war, the adult Aleksei is afflicted by a mysterious malady and haunted by memories of his father.

Maria's coworker Liza criticizes her for her neediness, calls her a bad mother, and expresses shock that her husband stayed with her for so long.

Pushkin argues that the split between Orthodoxy and European Catholicism gave Russia its distinctive character and says being Russian is a gift from God.

[e] Ignat leaves to answer the door, but when he returns, the woman has vanished, though the condensation from her teacup momentarily remains.

"[11] Critic Antti Alanen called the film a "space odyssey into the interior of the psyche" and Tarkovsky's own personalized version of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky wrote, "The hero of Mirror was a weak, selfish man incapable of loving even those dearest to him for their sake alone, looking for nothing in return—he is only justified by the torment of soul which assails him towards the end of his days as he realizes that he has no means of repaying the debt he owes to life.

Tarkovsky separately considered writing a novella about a boy who is evacuated to the countryside during World War II and is forced to train at a military school, but shelved the idea after deciding there was not enough material for a standalone work.

[7]: 128–29 In 1968, after finishing Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky went to the cinematographer's resort in Repino intending to write the script for The Mirror with Aleksandr Misharin.

Several versions of the script for Mirror exist, as Tarkovsky constantly rewrote parts of it, with the latest variant written in 1974 while he was in Italy.

[19] Initially, Tarkovsky considered Alla Demidova and Swedish actress Bibi Andersson for the role of the mother.

[23] Tarkovsky insisted on shooting the film without a clear idea of its structure, saying it needed to "take shape as if it were by itself.

[26] The festival's managing director, Maurice Bessy, was sympathetic to Tarkovsky, and had attempted several times to acquire Mirror for Cannes.

[31] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 82 out of 100, based on 14 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

"[28] Some viewed it as a major work that would be better understood by future generations; others dismissed it as an unfocused failure and believed that even more cultured viewers would find its story opaque.

[35] In his book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky reproduced fan mail from a variety of sources, from working-class film-goers to physicists at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

[7]: 9–13  A woman wrote to Tarkovsky that Mirror resembled her childhood, and told him, "Lord, how true ... we really don't know our mother's faces."

Tarkovsky wrote that he had "spent so many years being told that nobody wanted or understood my films, that a response like that warmed my very soul.

In a 2012 Sight & Sound directors' poll, Mirror ranked as the ninth greatest film of all time.

[45] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called Mirror "a startling piece of film-making" and many of its images "transcendentally brilliant".

"[47] Director Christopher Nolan cited Mirror as an influence on his 2023 film Oppenheimer, particularly in regard to cinematography.