“Mirror” saves its most puzzling segment for the last. As noted previously, one reason why this film is so psychologically rich is that it avoids psychoanalytic language. Tarkovsky navigates the terrain of his unconscious without attaching labels to it — so we are free to associate these images with religion, culture or Tarkovsky’s psyche, there is no wrong answer.

This becomes more challenging when Tarkovsky enters the dreamscape, because so much of our understanding of dreams is based on what writers like Jung have written about them. And we are used to observing the dream like nature of films, over many decades, through this Jungian interpretive lens.

But like the introduction to Bergman’s “Persona,” the ending scenes of “Mirror” dissolve into symbol … the recurring setting, the childhood home: sometimes empty, sometimes inhabited by a stranger, sometimes destroyed, returned to the soil with only faint outlines remaining.

The mother cannot be pinned down in time or space. Old or young, nostalgic and pragmatic.

The boy shifts generations. Is he dying? Or is he just dreaming himself awake?

Poems begin and fade out. An actress stares directly into the camera, as if knowing a secret she’s only half willing to share.

A puppy appears on a cabinet — no explanation given.

It all defies a categorizing brain’s logic. The eye begins to wonder if the telephone poles were supposed to look like a crucifix. Is this movie secretly explaining itself the way “Andrei Rubalev” flashed the works of art at the conclusion, making clear how life became art.

The sense of not-knowing is overwhelming. We can either reject the film for this chaos or roll with it. One thing we can’t do is solve it. There is no skeleton key and nothing on the other side of the mirror to reflect back at us.

We leave “Mirror” confused, as if shaken from a mid-day nap that conjured a haunted REM state.

Anima, psyche, shadow … these are Western terms. Tarkovsky has heard them and probably understood them just fine. He just found them lacking. He wanted to find a deeper poetry.

“Mirror” is like fading into one final dream before consciousness fades for the last time and we enter the mysterious unknown.