Saturday November 7 2026, 2:39pm
“Are you watching closely?” For centuries, audiences have been captivated by magic: impossible acts performed in plain sight, from street corners to theatre stages to America’s Got Talent. Much of its appeal lies in the mystery. We are always hungry for answers, desperately searching for explanations for something we know cannot be true. But of course, as Cutter acknowledges in The Prestige, we do not really want to work it out, because magic can only stay alive for as long as we want to be fooled.
I believe cinema operates in much the same way, just with different tools. But I am less interested in how a trick is done than in what that trick is used for. In the hands of a filmmaker, illusion is not merely spectacle. It can evoke memory, manipulate scale, heighten grief, or make an impossible world feel completely real.
It can blow someone’s mind.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror is widely regarded as his magnum opus: a poignant, fragmented biography of Alexei, a dying man in his forties, as he revisits memories of childhood and a family shaken by the political and religious upheavals surrounding World War II. Told through surreal flashes and a deliberately non-linear structure, the film drifts between memory, dream and reality, taking us through the recesses of Alexei’s consciousness.
But beyond being a symbolic reflection of Tarkovsky’s own childhood, I think the “mirror” in this story means something more.
“It can evoke memory, manipulate scale, heighten grief or make an impossible world feel completely real”
Tarkovsky was known for deceptive camera techniques and deliberate inconsistencies that blur the boundary between reality and illusion. Like a mirror that can be framed, distorted or warped into an imperfect image, he manipulates objects, spaces, and forces to challenge our understanding of what we see. He toys with our instinct to search for logic and truth.
Early on, a man walking through rolling buckwheat fields is distracted by an exceptionally well-timed gust of wind sweeping through the flowers. The moment feels strangely supernatural, as though the landscape itself has been stirred by the memory of someone who once inhabited it. For decades, viewers speculated about how Tarkovsky had captured it.
The answer was remarkably simple: a helicopter hovering just out of frame.
That is the beauty of cinematic illusion. It does not need to be elaborate or ostentatious. The most effective tricks are often the simplest, executed with absolute precision and intention. Tarkovsky’s helicopter is invisible to us, yet knowing of its existence completely alters what we perceive within the confines of the screen. Perhaps unpacking the “mirror” of Mirror was never the point. It simply had to offer its audience a fantasy shaped by the frame.
Where Tarkovsky’s illusions are deliberately subtle, other filmmakers have had to engineer entire worlds around the same principle.
Take Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien describes Hobbits as “[…] a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded dwarves.” Elijah Wood was, of course, not half the height of Sir Ian McKellen, so Jackson needed Frodo and Gandalf to appear dramatically different in scale whenever they shared the screen.
His solution relied heavily on forced perspective: placing actors and objects at carefully calculated distances from the camera so that one appeared much larger than the other, even as the camera or background moved. Scenes that appear effortless on screen were therefore the product of an extraordinary amount of engineering behind the scenes.
Then there is Contact, where illusion becomes a way of intensifying emotion.
In one remarkable sequence, a young Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway races upstairs after witnessing her father collapse. She runs towards a bathroom mirror, yet the camera seems to have vanished. Is it filming through the mirror? From behind her reflection? Somehow both? More remarkably, the scene appears to unfold as a single continuous shot.
The trick is that the mirror is not a mirror at all. It is a blue screen.
The footage of Ellie bolting up the staircase was reversed and composited into the frame, making the set appear to be reflected. Subtle shifts in shutter speed heighten Ellie’s sense of dread and helplessness, while alternating shots are seamlessly stitched together. What feels like an impossible continuous movement is, in fact, several pieces of footage disguised as one.
“The camera becomes a means to an end, a portal into a world of your own making”
Sure, Tarkovsky’s helicopter was his way of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. But perhaps the same effect could have been conjured with a ceiling fan and a few cleverly constructed background sets.
Technology is merely one ingredient in the recipe for cinematic impact. Every technique has its limitations, but within those limitations lies an inexhaustible range of possibilities. A helicopter can become a supernatural gust of wind. A moving platform can transform an ordinary actor into a Hobbit. A blue screen can turn a mirror into an impossible camera movement.
And so, for aspiring filmmakers, the lesson is not to become paralysed by logistics. Instead, ask yourselves passionately: what do you want your audience to believe? Once that intention is clear, the camera becomes a means to an end, a portal into a world of your own making.x
Because sometimes, the most powerful trick is the one your audience never realises you pulled off.
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