The film opens in the setting of the Korova Milkbar where a long rectilinear corridor is structured on either side by kneeling statues of nude women facing each other. This symmetry is also at work in the narrative construction: "The script is a model of balance – three parts of 45 minutes each, the central portion of the triptych (prison, the cure) separating two itineraries counterbalancing each other term by term albeit with a different order [...]" (1). Within these two itineraries, the two intrusions at the Alexander home function as a mirror of each other.
The first sequence begins with a shot of Mr Alexander seated at his desk, typing on his typewriter. Someone rings the doorbell. The camera carries out a travelling to the right and frames Mrs Alexander. She walks down a corridor, the walls hung with large mirrors creating a reduction effect. The draughtboard flooring, a recurrent motif in Kubrick's films, accentuates the overall symmetry of the shot.
The second sequence, later on in the film, seems like a visual echo of the first: same framing on Alexander, typing away, same reply and the same travelling to the right when someone knocks at the door. This time, the camera goes towards a man lifting weights. He, too, walks down the mirrored corridor. However, when he opens the door, it is not an aggressive Alex who enters but an Alex who has been attacked: the young man, beaten bloody in the previous sequence by his Droogs, who have become policemen, collapses in the entrance.
Irony of fate in the form of an inverted repetition in a falsely open and transparent space, which, in fact, closes in on Alex like a trap. From one sequence to the other, the cat has become the mouse.
(1) Michel Ciment, Kubrick: the Definitive Edition, (New York, Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 97.