This is the second feature by Dutch director Marleen Gorris, whose 1982 film A Question of Silence made her one of Europe's leading feminist filmmakers and by far the most controversial. Audiences sat in hushed wonder as A Question of Silence unfolded its tale of three women who murder a male shopkeeper, just because... We were to fill in the motive, and this was the film's clever conceit. Broken Mirrors, a thriller, is both more audacious and more literal in its treatment of the war between the genders. It is also less of a fairy tale, for its aggressors are men, its victims women, and its story grisly.

Two parallel plotlines tell one tale: The first is set in an Amsterdam brothel called the Club Happy House (a double entendre, as things develop), where cynical humor is the only relief from abuse for the professional prostitutes and moonlighting housewives who work there. The second thread follows the ordeal of a housewife who is clubbed, kidnapped and tortured by a deranged man who also photographs her slow demise. Gorris' bravura film technique plays away from the action with a physical sense of the supra-real and a script filled with ironies born of rage. But she leaves no doubt that, for her, the screen is an unbroken mirror for a skewed reality. —BAMPFA