There are some films that creep into your subconscious, take root and never stop nourishing it. Expanding it. Jean Cocteau’s 1950 classic “Orphée“, a new restoration of which the BFI is currently re-releasing, is one of these films.

Hauntingly re-imagining the Greek myth of the lyre player who dared to travel to Hades to find his wife Eurydice, Cocteau envisions his Orphée as a disillusioned, left-bank poet in post war Paris, and the underworld as another, magical dimension to be reached through a dissolving mirror. In making it so, he comes up with ageless and ever influential cinematic imagery of indescribable beauty that inspired Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth”, David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” and the Duffer brothers’ “Stranger Things” among many, many others.

So, don’t overthink it. Follow your instincts, or better yet your fearless imagination. Is time to boldly go through the mirror again.