Christopher Rhoten
In Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3, pianist Laura (Paula Beer) survives a devastating car accident in the countryside that kills her boyfriend. She is found by Betty (Barbara Auer), a woman who witnesses the crash and subsequently offers to house the traumatized musician while she recovers. Laura graciously accepts, and her road to recovery begins with a hot cup of tea and a warm bed.
The maternal Betty welcomes the troubled musician with open arms, while her husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and son Max (Enno Trebs) are more hesitant to accept a stranger into the family. Gradually, Laura wins them over, too. She has the family piano tuned up for a concert, and even prepares their favorite dish (‘Königsberg dumplings,’ which Google assures me is a real thing). Laura’s extended stay begins to feel like a mutually beneficial vacation, especially since her warm presence rarely suggests someone grieving. While this arrangement proves comforting for a while, memories of the past begin to unearth trauma that the family hasn’t quite buried.
Almost everything is broken in Miroirs No. 3, from sinks to bike seats to the dishwasher, which humorously blows up halfway through the film. Naturally, Christian Petzold extends that idea to people, family structure, and relationships. When we first see Betty, she’s painting a worn fence pure white. Laura helps finish it, and Richard and Max are inspired to fix the other appliances that keep breaking. But the central relationship also attempts to mend a terrible injury.
While Christian Petzold has already made a film titled Ghosts, it would be just as fitting here—Miroirs circles an unseen event we almost instantly infer through Betty’s gaze. For most films, it’d be a spoiler to share that we learn her daughter, Yelena, recently committed suicide, and that the addition of Laura (who wears her clothes and plays her piano) is a subtly twisted attempt by her mother to keep her alive. But a discerning viewer will make this connection right away thanks to a steady accumulation of clues, and Petzold does not attempt to play the third-act reveal as a surprise.
What makes Miroirs a layered film is how complex the questions become in this otherwise simple movie. Is this situation healing or merely extending the aftermath of pain? What led to Yelena’s death, and what caused the depression Laura was suffering from before the accident? Who is even the protagonist here? The title of Miroirs No. 3 tellingly refers to the middle movement of the piano suite Miroirs by Ravel, suggesting that this is a transient view into a larger story.
Miroirs is all about that strange period of living in the aftermath of death, when life seems to pause, and contrasting feelings live in opposition. In an interview with Letterboxd, the German filmmaker mentions that his grandfather was part of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel, and that after the war, his family would “speak not of mass murder or traumatic events, but of a paradise lost.” Such sentiment is felt behind the tragedy that has left the family in Miroirs suspended.
Petzold has made several conceptual “trilogies,” and Miroirs No. 3 is presumably intended to complete his “Elemental Trilogy,” which previously gestured to both water in 2020’s Undine and, well, fire in 2023’s Afire. One supposes that earth is the focus here, in the form of gardens, bike paths, and the humid summer heat. And while the idea of two women recovering together might bring Persona to mind, the clearer influence is Alfred Hitchcock, primarily 1940’s Rebecca, which was screened for the cast. Nearly all of Petzold’s filmography explores identity and how it can fracture or double, and it is the memory of another life—perhaps Yelena’s, or perhaps Laura’s own—that intrudes upon this newfound peace.
This isn’t to say Miroirs No. 3 is dark or oppressive. With its delightful rural scope and sunny, pastoral exteriors (the family travels almost exclusively by bicycle), Miroirs is an obvious love letter to those liminal experiences that make up much of our lives. Wisely, it is a film that does not overexplain its ideas through dialogue or escalating contrivances. Beer, making her fourth consecutive collaboration with the director, is particularly good at illuminating the largely silent Laura through body language, constantly pointing to a past as inscrutable as that of her doppelganger.
Such restraint is to be admired in the runtime, if nothing else. I will die on the hill that the world needs more films like Miroirs that sit closer to 86 minutes than two and a half hours. While an ultra-small-scale exercise in minimalism that will leave many wanting more, it is precisely those unanswered questions that make the brief, understated Miroirs No. 3 a memorable movie.
