Mirrors No. 3: Suspense melts away into golden summer days in Christian Petzold’s low-key psychodrama

• Reviewed from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival

For the first time since his 2000 debut The State I Am In, Christian Petzold places a family at the centre of his film. In Mirrors No.3, the German writer-director transforms a tragic accident into a new beginning for four people – some strangers, others estranged – when a family of three takes in Laura (Paula Beer), who’s survived a car crash unscathed. The gruesome accident is left off screen, but the tensions preceding it simmer in every glance exchanged between Laura and her boyfriend, anticipatory grief shining in her eyes as he blames her for ruining the weekend getaway. Tires screech and the unthinkable happens, but Laura is saved and taken in by an older woman, Betty (Barbara Auer), living nearby.  

Unlike Afire (2023), which was also set in the countryside, Mirrors No.3 makes the fields of Brandenburg county a consoling space rather than a romantic one. As Laura recuperates under Betty’s unobtrusive care, the two women form a bond free of the usual societal narratives – what blooms between them can be at times sisterly, or maternal, even a tiny bit erotic as they cook or paint a fence together. Far from the demands of life, work, and study, the young woman remains cautious as she accepts the love she’s given as readily as the old clothes that fit her surprisingly well. Soon after, Betty’s husband (Matthias Brandt) and son (Enno Trebs) join them too: two tradesmen, equally concerned for the broken dishwashers and Betty’s skipped medication. 

In the film’s opening, we see Laura as someone who’s terribly uneasy, pulling at her purple jumper like it were a rag. She gazes down the river from a bridge before descending under it, aimless and impenetrable to an endearing degree thanks to Beer’s ever-glowing presence. In her fourth collaboration with Petzold, the German actress tints her performance with more melancholy than ever before. But she brings levity to every scene, in perfect tune with Petzold’s regular cinematographer Hans Fromm and editor Bettina Böhler, softening the suspense within a single take. 

For those expecting a neat conclusion to Petzold’s supposed ‘elemental’ trilogy of Undine (2020) and Afire, the spectral character of Mirrors No.3 will come as a surprise. Instead, the film has more in common with his earlier Wolfsburg (2003), Yella (2007), and in its Hitchcockian influences, 2014’s Phoenix. There may be faint echoes of Vertigo (1958) menace in Mirrors’ second half, but as the yellows of late summer days turn ochre, we drift into a deceptively soothing narrative arc. There are clues and there is a reveal, but more importantly, Petzold tries out an algebra of relationships that is new for him, namely that ‘3+1=2+2’ and that a single look of recognition has the power to save a life.