Tarkovsky held one of the strangest rationales for religious faith that I’ve ever heard. He was born in the Soviet Union and his family was not religious. But he came to believe over time that cultures without religion suffer in their art, so he had faith because he thought it would make him a better artist.

It’s a rather egotistical view of faith, one that places him in the center of the universe. God was good for his craft, so he embraced an Almighty.

But it also feels like loneliness brought Tarkovsky to God. Who else could understand his genius? John Lennon in “Strawberry Fields Forever” wrote “no one I think is in my tree, I think I must be high or low.” It isn’t that Lennon thought himself as unusually talented, he was surrounded by astounding talent. So too did Tarkovsky work with incredibly adept cinematographers, editors, actors and musicians.

There’s a sensibility to the great artist, however, that takes one to a place where communications can only be one-way, through the art. And so no one is in Tarkovsky’s tree either. He needs God to explain where these visions are coming from, why these startling images fit together into something that feels like revelation even when they defy explanation or understanding.

That leaves me, the one sitting here with a keyboard trying to ground “Mirror” onto the same terrain as every other movie I’ve watched. That’s impossible, because “Mirror” is nothing like any other film created.

Every frame of “Mirror” could be hung in a museum as a unique work of art. That means every second, Tarkovsky has given us 24 works of art. I know, it sounds like hyperbole.

But there’s no way else to classify the movement from that stunning barn burning in the rain sequence to what follows … to a young boy waking up in an angelic cloud of bedding. But just as Tarkovsky presents this lush, heavenly image, he immediately takes it back and sends us into a black and white vision of a forest.

And then the wind blows through that forest and we are back in the bed, but now it’s black and white. It’s as if Tarkovsky changed his mind about how he wants us to think of the boy mid-scene and switched from lush, heavenly color to a primal black and white. And this time the boy speaks, calling out “papa.”

The boy carefully gets out of bed and approaches the adjoining room. An article of clothing goes flying through a corner of the frame.

And now we see the father, but not with his son, in a country bathroom, pouring water over the head of a woman, very likely Maroussia, although we can’t know that for sure because the hair covers her face. We can surmise that this was a scene from Andrei’s early childhood, before his father left home. Is he recalling it fondly right now?

As the woman rises up from the basin, he hair still covering her face, we see the walls of the country house — it now looks like a horror film. The walls are darkened and mossy. Water starts to drip from the ceiling, which then collapses in slow motion.

And now we see, still in slow motion, Maroussia pulling her hair back, plaster falling all around her. She seems unconcerned by the chaos, as if she’s integrated it into her existence. She’s beautiful. The decaying house with water pouring from the ceiling is beautiful. The mirror images are beautiful. It’s beyond sense.

The camera just drifts to Maroussia in a brink room that feels safer than the one with the falling ceiling, but it’s still adjacent to the harm. And the shot keeps drifting, now to an elderly, ghostly woman superimposed onto a stand up mirror. Is this Maroussia as an old woman?

She stares at a painted image of a pastoral landscape as if looking back on her youth. She reached up with her wrinkled hand and wipes the mirror, which makes a sound but doesn’t affect the image. And then it cuts to that hand in silhouette with a fireplace in the background.

The phone rings in a Moscow apartment. We see numerous pigeons hanging around the ledges. Alexi picks up, it is his mother. She’s called to give him news about something important to her — an old colleague she worked with at the printing company has just passed away.

But Alexi is so self centered, he takes his mother’s question about whether he’s feeling well, because his voice sounds off, into a jumping off point for talking about how he hasn’t spoken to anyone for days, and what’s the point anyway, words can’t really express what’s important to us. And then he wants to talk about a dream he had about her.

His mother can barely get past this fog to talk about her news. By the way, his apartment includes a movie poster for “Andrei Rublev,” the film Tarkovsky made just previous to “Mirror.” It’s a not-so-subtle reminder that Alexi is him. We have to give Tarkovsky credit here for not self aggrandizing. He’s honestly presenting himself as someone whose head is in the clouds so much he can’t even communicate easily with his own mother.

She eventually moves the conversation back to where she wants to go, but even then it’s only temporary, Alexi veers to a discussion about why they tend to quarrel so much.

The filmmaker Tarkovsky at this point seems to become impatient with his alter ego and cuts the scene. We’ll begin the next segment with Maroussia at that printing house in a sly and subtle scene that recounts the paranoia of the Stalin era.