To escape her insistent friend Liz, the atractive Pandora (a hauntingly beautiful and enigmatic Veronica Hart) runs into an antique shop where she stumbles upon a magnificent full-length mirror that immediately captures her attention. Although the elderly shop owner tells her the mirror is "useless" and not even for sale, Pandora is strongly drawn to it and is compelled to return and gaze into it again and again as, magically, the story of the piece and its enchanting past are revealed through various fragments from different eras. Initially, the mirror was a gift from a prominent nobleman to his young wife, which he crafted himself, adding a frame carved from an oak tree struck by lightning. Many decades later, in the 1920s, the mirror passed into the hands of a renowned actress, famous not so much for her acting as for her affairs with much younger men. The next period in which the mirror plays a central role is the 1980s, when an aspiring stage actress undergoes a highly perverse casting process at the express request of her producer, the renowned Barbara Mellon.

One of Shaun Costello's greatest works also stands as one of the most complex and fantastical adult films ever made, achieving sustained intrigue from the very first frames thanks to a deliberately slow pace and exceptionally beautiful cinematography, along with Costello's well-known musical selection (Bernard Herrmann's album "Vertigo"; two tracks by Mike Oldfield; as well as selections by Pino Donaggio [the one from De Palma's "Carrie"; and the traditional "Woman of Ireland," popularized by Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon," also used in this film]). To this day, it remains one of the finest works to emerge from the Golden Age of the genre. Costello took great care with every aspect of the production, and film scholars should pay special attention to the exquisite compositions and the unusual sophistication behind the cameras.