Miroirs No. 3

A contemplative mood piece, Christian Petzold’s Mirrors No. 3 reflects on grief as a moment of transformation, a chance for a new beginning. Petzold centres the story on the mysterious ambiguity of Paula Beer, now his most frequent collaborator, a partnership that defines his cinema as surely as Nina Hoss did in Barbara, Phoenix and Transit. With Beer, he has moved away from the weight of history and politics, turning inward toward intimate gestures and the quiet drama of people failing to bond.

The story brings together two women at very different points of loss. Beer's Laura is in a car that almost hits Betty (Barbara Auer) on a country road, a brief, loaded exchange of glances that takes on greater meaning when moments later her boyfriend Jakob is dead and she wakes up in a stranger's house. Betty, by contrast, carries an older, more diffuse grief, a family tragedy that has hollowed out her relationship with her husband and son. One loss is raw, the other long settled into the bones. What binds them is the mystery that connects not only them, but all of us. Not grief, but loss. 

Almost the entire film takes place at Betty’s rundown countryside house, with an unusual porch that faces the street like something from the American midwest, a spot stuck between two spaces, as if it has been waiting for something to fill it. Betty seems to recognise something in Laura, though neither woman fully understands what the other needs. It is this mysterious glue that Petzold wants to explore, but his curiosity about human emotion, mortality, and generational trauma is undone by the overly calculated approach. 

It’s acting that rarely wins awards precisely because it feels real rather than theatrical

Beer’s reserved performance gives Laura both intrigue and an internal life. It is the kind of acting that rarely wins awards precisely because it feels real rather than theatrical, no grand gestures, no visible working, just a woman you believe completely. Yet in encapsulating the temperature of the film, she makes it hard for audiences to warm to her.

Ultimately, the cold, cerebral formality that is so often Petzold’s strength becomes an albatross here. The plot points are too large to serve simply as explorations of character, and the film’s restraint begins to feel like avoidance. That Laura barely mourns the man she has lost is genuinely interesting, but Petzold’s detachment makes her less compelling. A film about the unknowability of grief ends up feeling a little too unknowable itself.

In US theaters now. In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Apr 17.