Teresa Reviews The Mirror Crack’d III (2018)

Teresa Reviews The Mirror Crack’d III (2018) and decided this was the worst Marina Gregg of all.

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Agatha adjacent: 3½ camera tripods

Mi-Ye is Margo Bence but the angriest, most conflicted Margo I’ve seen.

Quality of episodes: 4½ camera tripods

There were spots that were unclear (we need to watch it all again! Yay!) but wow. What emotion.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

When I first read The Mirror Crack’d decades ago, before I had children, I liked it but I’ll admit that Margo’s tragedy didn’t make much of an impression on me. Rereading it for the Agatha project and watching seven different Marina Greggs makes me realize how skillful a writer Agatha was. As your life experience deepens, so does your understanding of what she wrote. She should never be dismissed as a hack genre writer and Mirror is one reason why.

Seven Marina Greggs? Yes, seven that we’ve watched. In fact, I’d estimate that Mirror has more adaptations than Murder on the Orient Express, and is second only to And Then There Were None. We can’t see them all because we can’t find them or they don’t have English subtitles. Yet their existence shows how powerful this novel is. Hollywood (in the generic sense) adores making films about itself, where actors get to “act” on camera and ham it up in ways a good director would never allow. Watch Elizabeth Taylor in her 1980 version to see what I mean. There’s nothing as fun as navel-gazing.

What Hollywood also does, and here I’m referring to the U.S. and UK film industry, is sanitize a story to suit their self-image because the wrong kind of navel-gazing might lead to doubts and remorse.

Which brings us back to Marina Gregg and how she treated her adopted daughter, Margo Bence. The international versions we’ve seen, without exception, allow Margo to speak. She may forgive Marina in the Japanese 2018 version but she’s wounded. Marina done her and her siblings (if they’re included) wrong. Other international versions go further, from open, uncomprehending hurt to rage to here, where Mi-Ye hates and loves Lee Jung-Hee in equal measure.

As an unwanted 13-year-old living in an orphanage, she must have believed she’d never get a home and family of her own. But fate intervened and Lee Jung-Hee and Seong Jae-Duk chose her to adopt. Lee Jung-Hee asked her to call her mom, a word Mi-Ye thought she’d never get to say. Mi-Ye tells Ms. Ma that the three months she lived with Lee Jung-Hee and Seong Jae-Duk were the happiest in her life; an oasis of joy in the misery that came before and the even more challenging and traumatic despair that came afterwards, when Lee Jung-Hee threw her out because she was suddenly and unexpectedly pregnant with a “real” baby.

Interestingly, Lee Jung-Hee is even crueler than all those other Marina Greggs, including the novel. In the novel and the other films, Margo mentions that she (and her sibs if she’s allowed to have them in the adaptation) were “provided for.” They were packed off to boarding schools which they never left, even for weekends, summers, and holidays. But they were fed, clothed, and housed, even if they weren’t loved. But in Ms. Ma, that doesn’t happen. Lee Jung-Hee tells Mi-Ye to leave and don’t come back and no provisions for boarding school or money or care are made.

None. Nothing. Think about that. A 13-year-old girl suddenly thrown onto her own resources. It’s a miracle she made it and what she had to do to survive wouldn’t make a pretty story.

If you wonder how Agatha came up with this kind of behavior, keep in mind she was an observant woman and an excellent listener. People told her things. She wasn’t above eavesdropping. She wrote dozens of plays and spent extensive time in the world of the theater surrounded by theatrical people. The stories she must have heard! It wouldn’t be a far leap to take Gene Tierney’s (1920-1991) tragic story and mix in gossip about what happened to the kids when actors and actresses divorced and remarried and then had to cope with the previous spouse’s children.

Think of Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), who wasn’t an actress, but a mystery-writing contemporary of Agatha’s. She bore a son out of wedlock in 1924 and had to place the baby. She saw her son as often as she could, pretending to be a relative. When she married Oswald Arthur “Mac” Fleming in 1926, she wanted to legally adopt her son and acknowledge him. Mac refused to harbor another man’s child. So she didn’t. People do terrible things to the other people they claim to love and do equally terrible things to placate the people they love. Any advice columnist can tell you that.

It’s not a huge leap to imagine a self-centered actress who settles for adopting and then, when she becomes pregnant with a “real” baby, discarding the now-superfluous “not real” kids.

I never thought I could dislike Marina Gregg more than I already did until I watched this version. If abandoning her daughter wasn’t enough, Lee Jung-Hee refused to testify about what she saw in the rain at the Yongam reservoir when she watched the murderer carrying the girl’s body through the woods. She even saw the hair ornament, proving she’s got darned good eyesight. Every newspaper and TV station in Korea would have covered the gruesome murder. She couldn’t have avoided hearing about it. But did she step forward and save an innocent woman from being packed away to the prison asylum? Get justice for that murdered child? She did nothing. And when Ms. Ma showed up, she stonewalled her. When Inspector Han asked her, she lied.

I’ve only touched on part of what happens in this set of episodes! It turns out Lee Hung-Jee doesn’t murder her husband’s assistant director. That was someone else. Mi-Ye tries to drown Ms. Ma but she’s rescued by Ko Mal-Koo, sometime after he has a terrific scene bodyguarding Lee Hung-Jee because, as it turns out, someone else is very interested in what she saw at the reservoir that rainy night. He discovers that the gangsters menacing Lee Hung-Jee wear the same snarling wolf tattoo he does. Which means they’re related, somehow, to retired mob boss Jang Il-Koo who he cares for. Ms. Ma relies on Eun-Ji to find the pictures of the fateful housewarming party while she and the village library ladies vamp it up for photographer Mi-Ye.

We learn that Eun-Ji has a major secret: her little sister was kidnapped and murdered. We watch Inspector Han and his sidekick become more and more convinced that Ms. Ma couldn’t have done what they convicted her off. If they can’t haul 60 kg bags of rice through the woods in jig time, then how did a small woman do it in the dark in high heels?

And then, to prove this is Korean TV and not American TV, Lee Hung-Jee commits suicide and takes her secret eyewitness testimony to the grave. Ms. Ma will have to find someone else to prove she’s innocent. But will that someone be her doppelgänger who shows up at the climax? The one who I thought was a hallucination from early in the series?

Here we go!