Miroirs No. 3 ★★★
- 2filmcritics
- 1 hour ago
- 4 min read
Availability: Not in theaters; available through major streaming sites. Full information at end of review.
Women on the Edge
Near a country house outside of Berlin, a car accident kills a young woman’s boyfriend and slightly injures her, leading (improbably) to the young woman staying with the owner of the house, an older woman. Both Laura (the younger) and Betty (the older) are reserved and enigmatic as they cohab without engaging each other’s “stories.”
Respected German auteur Christian Petzold joins numerous directors making films about disturbed women.
Respected German auteur Christian Petzold joins numerous directors making films about disturbed women—among them “The Currents” from Argentina that we just reviewed, last year’s Rose Byrne-featured “If I Had Legs I’d Kill You” (the trauma of parenting a special-needs child), and “My Dead Friend Zoe” (2024, PTSD). Trauma, grief, and mental illness often produce strong performances, but storytelling is trickier. Petzold (also the writer) succeeds through two-thirds of this short drama. The set-up with Laura and Betty is intriguing, mostly because the viewer is unsure what is going on. Why isn’t Laura distraught over her boyfriend’s gruesome death? Why do townspeople walking by stop and stare at Betty (echoes of “The Quiet Girl” [2022], where a death many years ago is not apparent until late in the film).
Betty (Barbara Auer) drives Laura (Paula Beer) on her bike on the 2-track, 1-lane road. The older and younger women establish a mutually therapeutic relationship.
“Betty and Laura” is Act I. Act II is “Richard and Max,” though it deals less with the men themselves than with what they have to tell us about Betty, and maybe about Laura. Betty’s husband Richard and their son Max—who have some mystery to them too—run an auto repair shop a bike-ride away, and say they haven’t sat down with her in years. Matthias Brandt (husband) and Enno Trebs (son) are kinda fun as gruff mechanics, taking GPS trackers out of customers’ cars (anti-modernity with its all-pervasive surveillance) and fixing anything mechanical until they can’t (after their intervention, the dishwasher blows up). The men’s obsession with repairing inanimate objects is an apt metaphor for male avoidance of emotion.
The men’s obsession with repairing inanimate objects is an apt metaphor for male avoidance of emotion.
Betty and Laura’s relationship is slowly revealed to be mutually therapeutic. At the same time, Laura is a disrupter in the family dynamics of Betty, Richard, and Max. To his credit, Petzold’s approach to emotional instability and trauma is subtle and earnest. His exploration of the process of healing is a strength of the narrative.
There's a sweetness to the low-tech, rural settings. At the auto repair shop,
the outdoor table becomes a place for establishing relationships.
Max (Enno Trebs) and Laura (Paula Beer) share day beers.
The obligatory Act III begins with Max blurting out what he and Richard see as wrong with Betty, and with Laura. The mystery is solved. The therapy session is over. Not so interesting any longer. Max’s overdetermined explanation violates the screenwriting maxim, “show, don’t tell.”
All 4 of the principals are excellent actors, and their interactions with each other are a pleasure to watch—as long as one remains curious about who each one is and what they might mean to one another.
All 4 of the principals are excellent actors, and their interactions with each other are a pleasure to watch—as long as one remains curious about who each one is and what they might mean to one another. Laura (Paula Beer) and Betty (Barbara Auer) may be mirrors (“miroirs” in French) of the other. And who is mirror No. 3?
Laura (Beer, far right) adds to, and disrupts, the family dynamic among, from left, son Max (Trebs), dad and husband Richard (Matthias Brandt), and mother and wife Betty (Aura). On their porch, they are visible to townspeople who walk and bike on the narrow road.
For a reason revealed late in the film, the 4 are the subject of stares.
The settings have their own open yet claustrophobic fascination, whether the country home that sits along a 2-track, 1-lane road or the auto shop with its outdoor table and small dirty fridge with beer. “Want a beer?” must suffice for a come-on line. Petzold manages to take us back to a world without social media by using the life-style choices his characters have made rather than by placing the story in an earlier time period. There’s a peacefulness to the surroundings, though everyone lives a short car ride from Berlin.
Petzold feeds the contemporary fascination (now beginning to be criticized) with pathologizing everyone’s psyche. One wonders if he brings anything new to the conversation. In addition to this film, “The Currents,” “Remake,” and “Rose of Nevada,” all of which we reviewed this summer, deal with suicides or suicidal thoughts. Those thoughts open “Miroirs” rather than close it, and suicide is never explicitly mentioned except with respect to an absent character. It functions here as a sign that the issues treated are especially serious.
The last 2 films we’ve seen—“Miroirs” and “The Currents”—struggle with getting beyond the obvious pairing: pathologies and the therapeutic. While “Miroirs No. 3” treads lightly on the therapeutic by investing curative qualities in strangers, it nonetheless employs it. These are lovely, small, well-acted, interesting films, but they lack the sustained creativity of the better ones in the genre—of “My Dead Friend Zoe” or “All of Us Strangers” (2023), to name two that manage to transcend the expected.
She says: We seem over-run with pathologized young women, or maybe it’s 2 Film Critics’ choices in film.
He says: Max’s explanatory exclamation is a cinematic blunder of a high order, a failure of imagination that prevents an otherwise careful and subtle film from exploring its subject in innovative ways.
Date: 2025
Director: Christian Petzold
Starring: Paula Beer, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, Enno Trebs
Country: Germany
Language: German
Runtime: 96 minutes
Other Awards: 1 win and 12 other nominations, including at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival
Availability: No longer in theaters. Online rental and purchase on major platforms such as Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video, also on Mubi, kanopy, and Fandago at Home. See JustWatch here for complete availability.
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