Writer and Director: Christian Petzold
Christian Petzold presents an unusual doppelganger drama at this year’s BFI London Film Festival when a young woman becomes ensconced in a grieving family. A quiet study of the kindness of strangers, belonging and a need for meaningful relationships, Miroirs No 3 has a slow burn approach that hides its big themes among a restrained everyday domesticity in which no one says how they really feel but projects layers of expectation and hope onto people they hardly know. It cannot last, but Petzold make a compassionate case for understanding.
Involved in a car accident during an argument with her boyfriend close to the house of Betty, Laura is tended to and asks to stay, instantly comfortable in this home. Helping with domestic chores including painting the fence, cooking and washing up, Laura and Betty’s contentment is disturbed when Betty invites her erstwhile husband Richard and adult son Max to dinner where they meet Laura for the first time, only no one has told her the whole truth.
Miroirs No 3 has a very strange scenario and your enjoyment of the film rests on being able to suspend your disbelief enough to accept that a stranger living alone in a countryside house miles from any neighbours would accept Laura into her household, that Laura would herself want to stay and that the fatal car crash is quickly forgotten, including the man that Laura lived with – heinous as he appeared to be during his brief acquaintance with the audience. All of that aside then, this becomes a film about the small moments of connection that grow between four lonely people and the comforts they take from the relationship. Why is one of the major spoilers but the outcome is not so hard to guess, and on the whole Petzold controls the revelation gently and with care for characters all experiencing the isolating aftermath of trauma one way or another.
Laura herself remains faintly tangible throughout, and while the family she clings to are better drawn, her own life and willingness to abandon it feel too thin. Later in Miroirs No 3, there is a check-in on the life she left in Berlin in which Betty reflects on her seeming unhappiness but Laura is largely a cipher for bringing the family together and giving them the opportunity to come to terms with their own pain. In that Petzold is successful and while ambiguity remains about some of the characters’ motivations, there is an emotional authenticity in the film that works well.
With strong performances from Paul Beer as Laura who develops a nice chemistry with Barbara Auer’s kindly Betty and Enno Trebs’s Max in particular, this feels like a story with more to give, particularly in the mutual benefit that this connection brings.
Miroirs No 3 is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
