TIFF ’25: Miroirs No. 3

Mirrors No. 3
***/****
starring Paula Beer, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, Enno Trebs
written and directed by Christian Petzold

by Angelo Muredda Not content to have already put his stamp on Vertigo with 2014’s postwar noir Phoenix, where an Auschwitz camp survivor and cabaret performer who’s undergone facial reconstruction surgery finds herself remade into the image of her former self by the scoundrel husband who sold her out to the Nazis, Mirrors No. 3 sees Christian Petzold delivering a lower-key riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s masterwork. An uncanny, tragicomic European idyll that improbably takes equal inspiration from Vertigo, Final Destination, Mulholland Drive, and Hansel and Gretel despite largely being set on sun-kissed porches and in open garages, Mirrors No. 3 is a beguiling, singularly strange picture that could only have been made by the simultaneously heady and easygoing German auteur.

Paula Beer, Petzold’s muse since 2018’s Transit, stars as Laura, an anxious piano student from Berlin who insists her unhappy partner drive her back to the train station from a music festival minutes after they’ve arrived. Several bad omens into their return trip, the couple abruptly crashes their red convertible, instantly killing her partner and leaving Laura uninjured but dazed in a kind of fugue state. Uninterested in returning home or spending the night in the hospital, Laura asks to stay with Betty (Barbara Auer), a black-clad, middle-aged stranger with whom she ominously locked eyes moments before the crash as the older woman was painting a white picket fence outside her house–a home that seems curiously empty for reasons that will soon become clear to Laura.

Laura and Betty make fast friends as the latter nurses the former back to health, the two gardening and cooking together and forming a familial bond. The spell of that relationship is only broken with the arrival of estranged members from Betty’s real family: her husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and son Max (Enno Trebs), a father-son mechanic duo who come for dinner one evening at Betty’s invitation and, after taking one look at Laura in her borrowed clothes, decide that Betty is trying to replace her recently deceased daughter with this new, living model. Struggling with whether to intervene and tell Laura she’s being refashioned into a dead ringer for a dead girl (let’s call it “being Vertigo‘d”), Richard and Max soon choose the path of least resistance, projecting their own hangups about their lost daughter and sister on the confused young woman. For her part, Laura is initially happy to be their all-purpose cipher, but eventually she recoils at the realization they’re turning her into a surrogate for a ghost.

As that earlier collection of inspirations would suggest, Miroirs No. 3 is hard to pin down, veering from pleasant to sinister from scene to scene. The fun is in the indeterminacy. Even the title, a reference to the Ravel piece Laura is practicing for her final exam, only tells part of the story of Petzold’s classical filmmaking, which is undergirded by the pulpy undertones you might expect of a filmmaker who makes sophisticated psychodramas but loves movies like Den of Thieves. The film could just as easily have been titled after “The Night” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the vaguely spooky, propulsive northern soul song Max obsessively listens to on repeat throughout. The song’s lyrics, cautioning a woman to beware a mysterious man who keeps her dreaming in an ivory tower, speak to Laura on an unconscious level, and their repetition ad nauseam gives the film a Grimm fairy tale ambience despite the charming countryside sitting, rife with outdoor coffees and wines and bikes, Petzold’s favourite mode of transportation–much safer than cars.

The film is minor in its setting and subject matter compared to more ambitious works like Phoenix and Transit, not to mention Afire, which also begins as a summertime idyll before becoming a melancholic meditation on the existential threat of the climate crisis. Yet Miroirs No. 3 nevertheless shows Petzold’s deftness at balancing seemingly realist aesthetics with metaphysical concerns. The tone feels deliberate and controlled, whether Laura is bracing for impact at every bend of the road before the accident like the clairvoyant protagonist in Final Destination 2‘s opening set-piece or hitting it off with Betty like an age-mismatched version of Naomi Watts and Laura Harring’s Betty and Rita in Mulholland Drive. (One wonders if the repeating names are a reference or a happy accident.) There’s also an interesting friction between the family’s chipper exterior and possibly perverse intentions, which are unclear even to themselves. On one level, Betty is a folkloric witch who wills Laura into crashing at her doorstep, and her husband and son are a pair of psychic vampires feeding on a young maiden’s physical proximity to their loved ones. But they’re also a pretty standard dysfunctional family, peculiar in the way people deep in the denial stage of grief often are. You can’t help but laugh when Max reports to his parents that Laura looks fine after spying on her from afar on her trip to the city, knowing he’s stalking someone he barely knows but keeping up the appearance, partly to himself, that he’s just a normal brother doting on a sister who’s gone away to college. There’s depth to Petzold’s treatment of these contradictions that feels in line with the psychological complexity of the Hitchcock thriller he’s clearly stuck on. Like the song Max is obsessed with, the film is creepy, but it keeps you dreaming. Programme: Centrepiece