‘Miroirs No. 3’ Review: Christian Petzold Crafts a Subtle Tale of Second Chances

Short, compact, enigmatic and ultimately tender, Miroirs No. 3 is a deceptively light yet major film from German director Christian Petzold. After a long and distinguished career, it marks his debut in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival with a work that could easily have played in the main competition. In a brisk 85 minutes, the filmmaker behind Barbara continues along the rural and contemporary path he explored in Afire—another entry in his unofficial subgenre featuring multiple scenes of actress Paula Beer riding a bicycle.

It isn’t the only form of transportation her character uses here. But it’s the one that remains most accessible to Laura after the accident that changes her life.

When the film begins, Laura stands beside a river in what looks like the posture of someone about to commit suicide. Soon afterward she’s seen heading out on a work-slash-vacation trip with her boyfriend and another couple. While the others chat energetically, Laura seems distant, distracted, emotionally disconnected. Once they arrive, she tells her boyfriend she wants to return to Berlin. Reluctantly, he agrees to drive her to the train station, but on a narrow, winding road they get into a strange accident and the car overturns.

His injuries prove fatal. Hers are surprisingly minor.

Laura is picked up by Betty (Barbara Auer), a neighbor who had seen the couples drive past both on their way in and on their return from her house right next to the road. The two women had exchanged curious glances earlier. Rather than go to a hospital, the bruised Laura chooses to stay at Betty’s home, and the film centers on that unusual visit—one that grows increasingly enigmatic as the days pass, especially after the arrival of Betty’s son and partner (Enno Trebs and Matthias Brandt), who work together at a nearby auto repair shop and aren’t exactly a communicative pair.

Meals, borrowed clothes, repeated listens to one of the greatest pop songs ever written, piano performances (Laura is a pianist), moments of confusion and slightly mysterious encounters fill the film. It gradually becomes clear that some sort of secret lies behind the intense connection between Laura and this family—especially Betty. In fact, once she appears physically recovered from the crash, Laura seems eager to extend her stay. Betty, for her part, looks more than happy with the arrangement. Her husband and son, however, regard the situation with considerably more skepticism.

That mystery—like many that run through Petzold’s filmography—is important but neither definitive nor the sole engine of the narrative. It’s not presented as a puzzle that must be solved so much as a structural element shaping the relationships between the characters. In truth, Laura herself—about whom we know very little, and whose emotional state at the beginning remains unclear—is at least as enigmatic as this makeshift family that welcomes her in like the inhabitants of one of those strange fairy-tale houses.

The film toys with Hitchcockian ideas of identity substitution, possible amnesia, even a hint of madness. Yet unlike the melodrama of Petzold’s earlier Phoenix, here he opts for a lighter, more casual tone—one that occasionally recalls the sensibility of Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without a Past, though filtered through a distinctly feminine lens.

Miroirs No. 3—its title referring to the piece by Maurice Ravel heard at a key moment in the film—is a relatively small work within Petzold’s filmography. But it remains full of delicate emotional currents, the kind that reveal themselves almost sideways, whose true impact often becomes clear only afterward.

A dramedy about second chances, surrogate families, and the tragic-yet-miraculous possibility of beginning an unexpected new life, Petzold’s film represents a belated but meaningful recognition from Cannes—at least from one of its parallel sections, since the official competition continues to ignore him for reasons that remain baffling—of one of contemporary cinema’s finest filmmakers, an auteur fully deserving a place among the major figures world cinema has produced in the 21st century.