Miroirs No. 3 Review

Laura (Paula Beer) is in a car crash in the rural German countryside. Though her boyfriend Jakob (Phillip Froissant) is killed, she escapes more or less unscathed, just a little shaken. The crash happens near Betty’s (Barbara Auer) house, and Laura – lonely and troubled – asks if Betty can look after her. While they are strangers to each other, Betty, who has her own troubles, agrees. The two women settle into a companionable existence. After some time, Laura begins to wonder why Betty agreed to her peculiar request.

Miroirs No. 3, the latest feature from acclaimed writer-director Christian Petzold, is a quiet movie. It clocks in at under 90 minutes. After that car crash, which happens very early on, nothing all that dramatic happens. Yet Petzold is a master of mood, and the one he weaves here is intoxicating.

There is an essential otherworldliness to the relationship between Laura and Betty, and the way they seem to recognise each other immediately. It’s hard to say if it’s more odd that Laura would want a total stranger to look after her post the crash, or that Betty would agree to look after a total stranger. In the brief time we see Laura together with Jakob, she seems deeply uncomfortable, even a little fraught; being with Betty seems to calm her. Despite the profoundly unusual nature of their meeting, the two women do form a warm relationship, nourishing to both of them.

And yet, we know from the off that there’s something else going on here. Petzold is excellent at letting the gentle rapport between Laura and Betty live alongside the slow dread at what will happen when their utopian bubble is inevitably punctured. Information is dropped and new characters are added in such a way that, by the time we do discover why Betty was so ready to accept Laura into her home, we’ve basically figured it out. Then, it becomes a matter of wondering how Laura will react to this same information.

Although Miroirs No. 3 is in many ways an arthouse puzzle box movie, that categorisation goes some way to undermining the sensitivity and delicacy of Petzold’s work here. One of the few European directors who has regularly achieved worldwide distribution, who played a large part in elevating countrymen and women like Nina Hoss, Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer (sublime here, as ever) to global stardom, his films increasingly carry with them a sense of expectation. That his latest has been frequently referred to as a ‘minor’ work could have been cause for concern.

Really, however, there’s no such thing as a minor Petzold movie. Beyond this narrative’s central puzzle, there’s so much here about – to quote Joan Didion for the billionth time – the stories we tell ourselves in order to live; the processing of trauma; the necessity of companionship; and how fragile and malleable our self-image can be. Watching Miroirs No. 3 evokes the feeling of reading an excellent short story: though it may be over quickly, it lingers in your head for quite some time afterwards.

★★★★★