Miroirs No. 3 second look review: a glorious sun dappled noir from Christian Petzold

in a piano suite by Maurice Ravel; but it also reflects the director’s predilection across his filmography for doubles, doppelgängers and twice-lived lives. More than any working filmmaker this side of Hong Sangsoo, Petzold’s cinema constructs and exists within its own hall of mirrors, a vantage that inevitably confers a certain sense of insularity on the work. For viewers in search of an entry point, this movie may seem cloistered and inaccessible; those already on the inside of his sensibility – with its heady mix of throwback melodrama and gleaming modernity; of fine-grained precision and sometimes vexing ellipticality – will feel, if not exactly cosy, then at home.

The longing for domestic life and the infiltration of the family unit are themes that link Miroirs No. 3 to Petzold’s early drama Ghosts (2005), about a grieving mother who mistakes a wayward girl for her long-vanished daughter; the configuration resurfaces here via the relationship between Betty (Barbara Auer), an older woman who lives in the countryside, and Laura (Paula Beer), the Berliner delivered almost literally to her door by a violent car crash. The accident, and Laura’s apparently catatonic state in its aftermath, recall another Petzold classic, Yella (2007), itself modelled on Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962), the primal scene of the director’s hauntological funhouse aesthetic.

Betty isn’t lonely, exactly: she lives with her car-mechanic husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and adult son Max (Enno Trebs), who make for good company. But there’s something about Laura’s vulnerability that cues Betty’s maternal instinct, and vice versa; for reasons never quite elucidated to the viewer – and mysterious maybe even to herself – Laura immediately seeks refuge with this clan of strangers, sleeping in Betty’s spare room and padding around in clothes that seem, strangely (and suspiciously), to fit her fine: they certainly don’t belong to Max, who’s physically massive and ambivalent about his new, quasi-adopted sister. To continue with the auteurist annotations: the strange, unsettling sensations of playing house on somebody else’s turf, as if auditioning for existence adjacent to one’s own, link Laura, and the movie around her, to Petzold’s masterpiece, Phoenix (2014), which it resembles, at once deeply and obliquely, as a fairytale of rebirth from the ashes.

With this in mind, it’s at once irresistible and more than a little bit unfair to measure Beer, who’s acted in four consecutive Petzold features dating back to Transit (2018), against Nina Hoss, his previous leading lady (and the star of Yella and Phoenix). The prevailing wisdom among critics is that Beer can’t match her predecessor’s stature. Miroirs No. 3 isn’t obviously an actors’ showcase à la Phoenix, but Beer’s performance is nevertheless impressive in its own low-key, elusive way; the character’s name offers a sly nod to Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) (expounded upon by Petzold in interviews) and Beer’s pallid, de-glammed somnambulism has a bit of Gene Tierney in it, while the script reframes Laura’s premise of how it might feel to see a loved one come back from the dead. Crucially, Petzold channels these noir-ish themes through a sun-dappled provincialism that rhymes with the idyllic seaside setting of Afire (2023).

The difference is that where Afire couched apocalyptic anxieties in a leisure-time comedy of manners, a trifle with a bitter aftertaste, Miroirs No. 3 deploys Petzoldian alienation effects (slow pacing, enigmatic behaviour, bread-crumb trails of exposition) in the service of an essentially restorative world view. The good vibes are channelled via another of the filmmaker’s specialities, the deceptively contrapuntal needle-drop: to Tim Hardin’s ‘Hang on to a Dream’ in The State I Am In (2000) and Chic’s ‘At Last I Am Free’ over the end credits of Barbara (2012), and Talking Heads’ ‘Road to Nowhere’ as the outro to Transit, we can add Frankie Valli’s ‘The Night’, which serves, quite gloriously, as an in-film anthem. The space between Maurice Ravel and Frankie Valli may seem vast, but Petzold, who’s not just a model cinephile but also exceedingly popwise, locates and crosses the bridge.

► Miroirs No. 3 is in UK cinemas 17 April.