Miroirs No. 3

With customary elegance and concision, German auteur Christian Petzold delivers another sly, quietly foreboding psychodrama in the form of both fever dream and fairy tale. A magnetic Paula Beer — in her fourth collaboration with the director — plays Laura, a morose music student from Berlin who, during an out-of-town excursion, miraculously survives a car crash with barely a scratch.

Rescued by Betty (Barbara Auer), a local bystander, Laura forgoes the hospital and moves in with the benevolent stranger, who tends to her with anxious affection. As the two women fall into a domestic routine, Betty’s semi-estranged husband and son gradually welcome Laura’s presence, re-entering the family fold. But this new-found clan configuration is fraught and fragile as past ghosts begin to emerge.

Shot with clean and crisp natural light by Petzold’s longtime director of photography Hans Fromm and superbly acted by an ensemble of regulars, Miroirs No. 3 continues the filmmaker’s thematic exploration of trauma, memory, myth, and identity in a tale that is simultaneously haunted and enchanted. Its pleasurable tonal shifts owe much to the film’s rich cinematic, literary, and art historical allusions, as well as its inspired use of diegetic music, from Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons to the titular Ravel composition, a piece that is shimmery and suggestive: of ripples, danger, and isolation.

With its many motifs of breakage and repair and of doubling (à la Vertigo), Miroirs No. 3 wrings a taut psychological charge from the tension between the mirror and its reflection, one in which tenderness and subtle humour trouble its distortion.

ANDRÉA PICARD