Mirror draws heavily on Tarkovsky's own childhood. The film switches among three different time frames: prewar (1935), wartime (1940s), and postwar (1960s or '70s). The film's structure is discontinuous and nonchronological, without a conventional plot, and combines incidents, dreams, memories, and newsreel footage. The adult Aleksei is only briefly glimpsed, but is present as a voice-over in some scenes including substantial dialogue. Mirror depicts the thoughts, emotions and memories of Aleksei, or Alyosha (Ignat Daniltsev), and the world around him as a child, adolescent, and 40-year-old. It has especially found favor with many Russians, for whom it remains their most beloved of Tarkovsky's works. Since its release, it has been reappraised as one of the greatest films of all time, as well as Tarkovsky's magnum opus. Mirror initially polarized critics and audiences, with many finding its narrative incomprehensible. The film's loose flow of oneiric images has been compared with the stream of consciousness technique associated with modernist literature. Its cinematography slips between color, black-and-white, and sepia. The film combines contemporary scenes with childhood memories, dreams, and newsreel footage.

It unfolds around memories recalled by a dying poet of key moments in his life and in Soviet culture. Mirror is structured in the form of a nonlinear narrative, with its main concept dating back to 1964 and undergoing multiple scripted versions by Tarkovsky and Aleksandr Misharin. Innokenty Smoktunovsky provides voiceover and Eduard Artemyev the incidental music and sound effects.

The film features Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, Alla Demidova, Anatoly Solonitsyn, Tarkovsky's wife Larisa Tarkovskaya and his mother Maria Vishnyakova. It is loosely autobiographical, unconventionally structured, and incorporates poems composed and read by the director's father, Arseny Tarkovsky. Mirror (Russian: Зеркало, romanized: Zerkalo) is a 1975 Soviet drama film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.

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