Because it’s a Christian Petzold film, Miroirs No. 3 is an exercise in watching with the head tilted to one side. How’s he going to do it this time? “It” being either a remake of a familiar film, done with plausible deniability (the classic being Jerichow, an oblique take on The Postman Always Rings Twice). Or a fairy tale/myth reworked in modern dress, Petzold’s other obsession (see Undine or Afire).
Is it either here? Or neither? The set-up is downright strange. A piano student is involved in a terrible car accident in which her boyfriend is killed. Instead of heading off to hospital, she moves in with the woman outside whose house the accident happened. By the next morning Laura (Paula Beer) is dressed in the clothes of Yelena, dead daughter of the house’s owner, Betty (Barbara Auer). The days go by. Laura’s miraculously mild injuries heal. She helps Betty paint the front fence and starts helping out with chores about the place. Betty show Laura how to make a plum cake. Laura doesn’t appear to be planning on going anywhere soon, nor does Betty seem to want her to.
Betty lives alone but, Laura soon discovers, her husband and son live just down the way, where they run a business removing tracking devices from cars. “Are you crooks?” Laura asks son Max (Enno Trebs), a good looking young man. Max’s father Richard (Matthias Brandt) is far less amenable to Laura’s charms than his son, and bridles visibly when she is about. What’s that about, and why don’t Richard and Max live with Betty?
Both the entirely non-mythical, non-fairytale work Max and his dad do and Laura’s strangely direct question appear to be Petzold being funny. But more broadly, what’s going on here? Is Betty’s house a fairytale cottage in the woods? Is Max a handsome prince or Richard a big bad wolf? Is Betty a wicked witch, and Laura a sleeping princess? Laura is definitely keeping something from Betty and family, and they are just as surely keeping something from her. But most of all Petzold is keeping something from his audience, dropping in little hints but never quite coming right out and saying what he’s about.
It is all rather weird, unsettling, mystifying and not entirely satisfying, because everything seems so barely anchored in a familiar psychology. Beer you will know if you’re a Petzold fan. This is the fourth film she’s made with him. Sexy sprites of one sort or another is what she’s usually asked to be – a water nymph in Undine, a creature of fire in Afire. Is this the Earth section of an elemental trilogy? Auer too, has a history with Petzold, going back all the way to 2000’s The State I’m In.
They are both entirely watchable, as ever, as are Brandt and Trebs (also Petzold regulars), delivering a tale of bewitchment that feels like it’s an idea in search of a plot. The coolness is attractive if that’s how you like it, and the mystery is alluring if you’re happy never to get the answers to all the question. Beer remains magnetic, the Petzold muse that Nina Hoss once used to be, corny though the whole “muse” idea now seems.
There is no such thing as a bad Petzold movie. Even his student film, Pilots (Pilotinnen) – also about the odd relationship between an older and younger woman – is highly watchable. As is Miroirs No. 3, named after the Ravel piece that recurs, though interestingly it’s the Frankie Valli song The Night that really makes the musical running in this movie. What, I’ll ask it again, is that about?
Miroirs No. 3 – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
