Miroirs No. 3 Review: Lost Woman, Found Family

The German actress Paula Beer has a delicately expressive face. In her now-four collaborations with writer-director Christian Petzold, she’s registered vast emotions and emotive styles across that lovely face – tremolo as an abandoned wife in an authoritarian state in Transit, stormy as Undine’s titular nymph falling in and out of love, easygoing and open to sensation in Afire. But Miroirs No. 3 is the first time I can recall Beer playing zonked out. 

She opens the film in a tattered sweater and stumbling around Berlin. She drops her bag in the dirt and forgets to pick it back up. Eventually she wanders home, to an annoyed boyfriend (Philip Froissant); they’re meant to be on a day trip to the country with a music producer he seems keen to impress. In the backseat of a convertible, she – turns out her name is Laura – barely speaks. It’s hard to parse if she’s dazed or just sullen. There’s an air of unreality in the air; when twice the car passes a house on a country road and Laura locks eyes both times with its owner (Barbara Auer), you might wonder if there’s something even a little witchy going on here. 

Circumstances throw Laura and this woman – her name is Betty – together. (There’s so little plot to Miroirs No. 3, I’m loath to give it away, even though it’s the inciting incident.) Laura moves in with Betty while she recovers from a minor injury, and the two women form a quick, tender bond. Betty lays out fresh clothes for her, the jeans and tee of a younger woman, and when Betty accidentally calls Laura by a different name, it’s pretty obvious she’s thinking of another someone she used to mother. But Laura, gradually shrugging off her previous zonked-out-ness, doesn’t seem all that bothered; she seems hungry for some mothering herself. 

These scenes unfurl at an unhurried pace, but the dangling questions – of why Betty is so alone, in a house that’s falling apart, of why Laura seems so out of sorts – gives Miroirs No. 3 a prickling undercurrent of unease. Can this bond be trusted? Who is the damaged one, and who is the danger? Is it both? Or neither? Eventually, their tight twosome expands to two more members of Betty’s family, who share looks that confirm – all is not right here. 

Your best guess at Betty’s backstory probably isn’t wrong, but what surprised me about Petzold’s latest is how ultimately straightforward, even slight, it felt upon conclusion, even with certain questions left aggravatingly open-ended. Was that Petzold’s intention, or my mistake? His filmography – including Phoenix, 2014’s masterful upending of mistaken identity – is so rich with allegory and doubling, plot swerves and wild leaps of imagination. In this case, I wonder if familiarity with those other films sent me chasing maybe-imaginary breadcrumbs, in search of something deeper and more enigmatic afoot in Miroirs No. 3.

If that’s what the film is not, then what is it? A sensitively performed, not-uninteresting picture of people in pain – “stricken” is not too strong a word for this lot – and the comfort that can be found in connection, in a shared make-believe, I suppose. (The pastoral prettiness of Brandenburg is also, if not the point of the film, then a real point of attraction.) That’s not nothing. But as a whole something, this muted, dreamlike picture can’t help but feel insubstantial after so much fruitless mystery.

Miroirs No. 3 opens exclusively in Austin at AFS Cinema on March 27.

This article appears in March 27 • 2026.