PAULA BEER IN MIROIRS NO. 3 CHRISTIAN PETZOLD: MIROIRS NO. 3 (2025) BERLIN & BEYOND 2026 TRAILER A modern gothic fairytale about grief The brilliant German auteur Christian Petzold's new muse Paula Beer is featured in this engaging, peculiar film that has elements of fairy tale and perhaps of a Fifties American movie, a favorite point of reference for him. It's also another treatment by Petzold of changed identity and escaping from a past life. Not one of his very best, it's still an enjoyable and thought-provoking piece that tells a peculiar tale. The appeal of
Miroirs No. 3 (which alludes to a piano composition by Maurice Ravel) is it the way it draws us into a certain coziness and desire to escape, before, two thirds of the way through we say "Wait a minute! What the heck is going on here?"
Things get off to a dramatic start: Laura (Beer) is riding along in the German countryside beside a handsome young man, Jakob (Philip Froissant) who's driving a red convertible with the top down when Bang! it runs off the road, flips over, and Jakob is instantly killed. Laura is thrown from the car and survives with only a very minor injury.
Laura is unharmed, but of course very shaken. She immediately takes up residency with her rescuer, the middle-aged Betty (Barbara Auer), asking to stay with her and not go to a hospital. Betty readily agrees. Laura has a cozy bed and joins Betty in painting the picket fence white. Betty recalls Tom Sawyer. Soon Betty's husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and her son Max (Enno Trebs) come over. She invites them for dinner when she learns that Laura can make Königsberg dumplings, their favorite dish which is the one thing she can't make. The three turn out not to have sat down to a meal, or for anything, ina quite a while. Why Laura feels nothing about the demise of Jakob or what inner need for escape impels her to stay on, we never learn.
Betty has perked up, evidently, but Richard is worried that something is up and knows she is "off her meds." What meds? What is going on? The film ambles along for a while placing Richard, Max, Laura, and Betty in various situations before the explanation finally comes. The two men who're tradesmen, working men, who immediately fix things, take care of repairing the leaky tap, then the broken dishwasher, then other things. A piano tuner tunes the piano, for Laura, you see, is a music student and her playing is very fine. She needs practice; for them she plays a Chopin prelude. The one who used to play the piano was Betty's dead daughter Yelena.
Those who are good at guessing plotlines may have figured out what was going to happen in the first ten minutes., but it's only in the last five that, through a kind of ritual of reenactment, a gridlock of grief is, provisionally at least, released. And this is assisted partly with the healing power of music that Laura brings, especially in a late scene of her recital graduating from an academy of music in Berlin, when she plays Ravel's "Une barque sur l'océan" from
Miroirs.
Along with music, this is a quiet country world of jeans and beer, dumplings, pickup trucks and rickety bicycles. And beides the cdlassical music there are pop ballads including "The Night" by Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons (where Petzold alludes to Michael Cimino) and "You Go to My Head" by Mathilde Santing.
As usual with Petzold, the casting is a rock-solid building block. Barbara Auer has a zen-like calm and mystery, as does Paula Beer, as did Nina Hoss before her. Trebs and Brandt have a kind of movie star old-shoe masculinity: they seem by their presence to question Auer's Betty, but also to leave her be. There is a traditional feel of old American films of the country family who are strong, but with trauma behind them somewhere and the actors convey this nicely. And yet of Petzold's recent series of "ghost stories" this has been called the minor one, and it doesn't have the depth or impact of his other work and, carrying along the music image, can be indeed considered a "chamber piece." But it is also a typically spare and elegant piiece of work that doesn't at all overstay its welcome. Even if this is minor Petzold attendees of this year's Berlin & Beyond will find here contemporary German filmmaking at its most prestigious.
Miroirs No. 3, 86 mins. premiered at Cannes Directors Fortnight May 17, 2025. Also at Sidney, Munich, Jerusalem, Busan,São Paulo, New York. and a number of other US festivals, BFI London, Vienna, Thessaloniki, and many other international festivals . It was screened for this review as part of Berlin & Beyond.
Showtime:
Showtime: Rialto Elmwood, Berkeley – March 23 at 6:45 PM – Buy Tickets.Miroirs No. 3 opens theatrically in the US Mar. 20, 2026.
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