With Christian Petzold, one practically expects to have the rug swept from under them when they go into a new work of his. Spectres, wraiths and doppelgängers haunt his stories, inflecting the checkered history of his native Germany as the past permeates the veil of the present and ordinary lives oscillate between lines of the real and the fantastical. Miroirs No. 3, his newest offering, retains these distinctly Petzoldian undercurrents and proclivities, albeit with a greater degree of restraint than we’ve been used to seeing. It’s restraint in the sense that there is no overt and climactic coup de grâce here to dislocate the viewer and shatter their sense of comfort in the way that, for instance, the final scenes of Phoenix and Transit do. Some may consider this a more minor work as a result, but there are still many pleasures to be found in this new tale that he’s fashioned for us.
The gist of it is relatively simple: a young woman, Laura (Paula Beer), survives a car accident which tragically kills her boyfriend. The sole witness to the accident, an older woman named Betty (Barbara Auer), rushes to help. By some miracle, Laura is barely injured, but rather than going to the hospital to recover, she requests to stay with Betty—despite being a total stranger. Betty inexplicably agrees without hesitation, and thus begins an unusual friendship between these two women, who seem intensely drawn to each other’s company.
The reason for this attraction is strongly hinted at by Petzold quite early on, and a more ungenerous viewer may lament that the game is given away too early. But as the story unfolds and its focus on the collateral damage of grief comes into sharper focus, what is clear is that the “twist” (if one can call it that) is not really the point. It exists, but only as a complement to what becomes a sympathetic portrait of how people recover from loss and learn how to move on when the time is right.
It’s Petzold’s sense of empathy and staunch refusal to turn to grotesque clichés which demonize mental illness that provides Miroirs No. 3 with its natural catharsis. This is further echoed by the Maurice Ravel composition for which the film is named after, and which is also played at key moments by Beer’s character. Music, as we know, is a healing art, bringing together disparate, sometimes broken lives in a single moment of sonorous unification. So too can cinema reach the same goals, as film festival attendees at TIFF can likely attest. But for this moment of solidarity to be truly reached, keeping an open heart to those around us is paramount, as is giving grace to those who have struggled in darkness and have only just reached the light again.
That is where Miroirs No. 3 reaches its quintessence: in the calm moments of mutual recognition and appreciation, in the quiet kindnesses afforded to those who have suffered pain, in the way the ghosts of the past come back to bring peace rather than fear. The film may not astonish in the most visceral of ways, but it’s in these small generosities in which it soars the fullest.
Miroirs No. 3 had its North American premiere at TIFF in the Centrepiece programme on September 6, 2025.
The Lonely Film Critic 