Russians may find profundity in the story and themes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 film The Mirror, but for the rest of us it’s the images, the visuals.

A woman runs. A barn burns. A bird lands on a boy’s cap. A dog leaves a cabin. A boy looks back at himself. The music plays. And we reflect. We know something about who we are, as if a light glowed behind us, as if this was not so much a movie as a dream that we had somehow conceived together.