Watched  all nine episodes of Spain's The Girl in the Mirror (Alma) (2022). A bus loaded with 19 students falls into a ravine in the Pyrenees after their mountain holiday, and only a few of them survive, one of them being Alma, the female protagonist in the story. It is soon revealed from an ancient book of prophecies that "five spirits will possess five youths on the third moon of the year" for the reincarnation of Therion, the pre-existential beast, who lives inside a red chamber in the mountains.

Many of the episodes in the movie are prefaced with the myth of Therion spanning his continued incarnation over hundreds of years. The youths become involved in the search for the beast's hexaspeculum, which is found in the ruins of a castle. Annoyingly, though, every modern story anchored to a myth entails too much exposition and too much discussion, resulting in very little action, like a Dan Brown movie with a lot of Wikipedia dialogue written in. To complicate matters, toward the end of the movie we are shown that there has been a switching of identities and, consequently, in points of view a la The Others, which comes across not as enlightenment but as cinematic betrayal, and that is when the story begins to deteriorate. There are more surreal moments than real moments, which tends to alienate viewers. And the unexpected straight, gay, and lesbian sex scenes with nudity provided no relief at all. In the end, both the premise and the resolution seemed terribly convoluted and contrived.

The actress who plays both Alma and her identical twin Lara has a mole under her left eye, which was quite disturbing to me because identical twins can't be all that identical. The Celtic rune Ingwaz (Living) kept appearing and reappearing as the youths' signature symbol, and nothing was explained as to why. In addition, the character orchestration of the five youths did not clearly reflect "the wisdom of the bear, the strength of the lion, the cunning of the wolf, the freedom of the eagle, and the ability to change skin like the snake."

On the whole, this movie should have been more about the living than about the dead, and could really have been told with only one young survivor. I was somehow hoping that the red chamber would simply be the residence of the Jungian Shadow, but the story was far too gothic for that.