This article appeared in the June 4, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.
Mirrors No. 3 (Christian Petzold, 2025)
Christian Petzold has been a regular on the festival circuit for a quarter of a century, competing multiple times in Berlin and Venice, but this year marked his first appearance in Cannes. Mirrors No. 3, which screened in the Directors’ Fortnight section, is the German director’s 11th theatrical feature, his fourth consecutive collaboration with the actress Paula Beer, and his umpteenth riff on his perennial touchstone Vertigo (1958)—which is to say, another spectral tale of hauntings and doublings, rife with echoes of classical cinema (and of Petzold’s other movies), and yet very much its own mysterious object.
In Mirrors No. 3, as in Petzold’s 2007 film Yella, a car crash induces a trance state. After surviving an accident in the German countryside that kills her boyfriend, Laura (Beer), a morose piano student from Berlin, wanders into the life of an enigmatic woman, Betty (Barbara Auer), who—for reasons initially unclear—is living apart from her husband, Richard (Matthias Brandt), and adult son, Max (Enno Trebs), who work at a nearby auto-repair shop. Amid the everyday domestic routines that emerge from the realignment that brings its four characters together, the spare, elegant, deceptively simple Mirrors No. 3 locates uncanny fissures and surprising depths of feeling.
On the day of his premiere, I met up with Petzold—who, though recovering from a migraine, was in good spirits—to discuss endings, beginnings, and the importance of repair.
Mirrors No. 3 is titled for a piece of music, by Maurice Ravel. How did music factor into your conception of the film?
The last few movies I’ve made are about people who have lost their senses. They have forgotten how to smell, to taste, to see, to hear, and they have to learn it again. Cinema likes to see people who are in a process, not people who are in a situation, and the process of winning back your senses is a subject I’m interested in. Music in films—it’s always something from outside. It’s from a godlike storyteller who thinks he or she knows more about the characters. At this moment in my life, I don’t want to use music as an extradiegetic score. I want to see people playing music, listening to music, hearing the sounds of the world, hearing and seeing the wind in the trees. I want to see them open their minds.
I remember how you described the film two years ago, before you shot it, and watching it, I realized you had given me a very precise description of how the narrative is set in motion—the first 15 minutes or so. I didn’t expect it to turn into a film about family, which is a subject you have dealt with before but not recently.
Yeah, that’s interesting. You know Barbara Auer, who plays the mother? She played the mother 25 years ago in my film The State I Am In (2000), and it’s not a coincidence that I thought about her as the mother here. Because I have a family of my own, I usually don’t want to make movies about families. It’s from my biography; it’s too near. I prefer people who are not like me. But when we made Afire (2023), we had scenes with groups of people sitting around a table, a little bit like in 12 Angry Men (1957). With many of my previous movies, it’s one or two people at the table, shot-countershot. In Afire, I was so interested in this situation of the group: who is in love with whom, who hates whom, everything at the same moment. When I was younger, I didn’t have the skills to make a scene like this, to work on both sides: on the surface and also under it. Working with this ensemble in Afire gave me the trust to make a movie about a family again.
It’s something for cinema—to see people under pressure. With the family in The State I Am In, the pressure comes from outside, from the state. Now [with Mirrors No. 3], the pressure on this family comes from inside. This is something totally different. I think I needed 25 years to think about how I could make a movie about this. I could have told you the whole story in New York two years ago, but I didn’t know at the time how to realize it.
So you figured it out in the process of making it? I heard you reshot the ending.
This was the first time in my life that I did that, and it was six months after we shot the final scene. In the original ending, the family is sitting on the porch, and suddenly they notice that Paula Beer’s character is back, standing at the fence, with her luggage. The last sentence of the script was, “She opens the gate and intrudes into the life of the family.” I liked this sentence so much!
With my editor, Bettina Böhler, I watched the scene, and we knew something was totally wrong—it was a big, big mistake. We can’t tell a story, 90 minutes of someone looking for herself, and then in the end, she’s just a daughter! I had a depression for two weeks. I stopped editing; I thought it was the worst movie I’d ever made in my life. A little bit of negative narcissism.
In cinema, you have a collective intelligence, and that’s why it’s the best art in the world. From the discussions I had with Paula Beer and Enno Trebs, they also told me, “That’s not the final scene.” Then Bettina said, “Okay, let’s take all this shit out, and use an image of Paula in her apartment.” At that moment, I knew what this movie was about. It’s about a family that learns to live with trauma, and with the absence of their suicidal daughter. But that was not in my mind during the writing, because literature is completely different from cinema. In literature, you have a romantic final sentence, and you are proud. As a writer, you can lie 24 hours a day. Cinema knows when you start lying.
To turn from the ending to the beginning, I’m curious about how Laura, Paula’s character, is established. You get a sense that all four characters are dealing with some form of depression. The context becomes clear for the three family members, but never for Laura.
I think the medicine I took against the headache—
It’s kicking in?
It’s working now, like cocaine [laughs]. You know, I cut out the opening scenes, too.
Oh really? What was the opening?
It gave the character of Laura more biography. We see her at school. She can’t play piano anymore. All these things, about five or seven minutes, I cut out, and decided to start with her by the river. Paula liked it, but she asked me why. And I said to her, “In Alice in Wonderland, you don’t know anything about Alice.” This was very important. To have someone who is not okay, but she gets a biography later, from the story, from the contact with the family, and not from something I give her, like luggage. Paula liked this new start of the movie, because it was also like we were taking something from Undine (2020). She’s someone from the waters, and she wants to live on our earth.
So it’s as if the actors are themselves carrying these ghostly traces from their other roles.
Yes, like Barbara, who was the mother in The State I Am In. And Matthias Brandt, who played the editor in Afire—an editor is someone who’s repairing things, and here he’s repairing cars. This was the other important subject for me. This is a bad sentence, but I’ll say it anyway: we’re living in a capitalistic world [laughs], and everything that is broken, we throw away. To repair things, you need respect for what you want to repair. You must understand the engine, the car, the soul, and the mind, too. When you see old westerns, the characters can repair anything!
I remember when my daughter was 5 and she couldn’t sleep one night, we watched a James Bond movie on TV. After 20 minutes, she said to me, “I love James Bond movies. I want to see more of them.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “Because they can destroy everything and don’t have to repair it” [laughs]. Because she always had to repair the things she broke in her room. So this is something I’m interested in: how people try to start to repair things again.
Including cinema?
Yes. In the cinema world, in the last decades, there is a desire for tabula rasa. Because we can’t repair all this shit, we have to destroy it. We have so many dystopian movies where the world is clean again. This is a fascistic vision, to clean everything, like the Berlin architecture of Albert Speer. I think we have to repair things again, look again at what is broken. Two days ago, I saw a documentary with Jean-Luc Godard talking to Marguerite Duras, and they were talking about deconstruction: you have to deconstruct the world. Maybe at the end of the ’60s, but now, no, we have to reconstruct.
It’s often said that most of your films are, in some sense, ghost stories. Here there are moments that suggest fairy tales, and there are also these occasional drifts into the language of horror movies. I wonder if that has to do with the return to the family.
Well, 99 percent of horror comes out of families [laughs]! There’s a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, “The Shroud.” It’s about a mother, and she’s waiting for her dead son, who comes each evening and sits there. It’s a really hard story, yeah? After three or four nights, the son says, “Mother, you have to stop crying. I want to go to heaven. But it’s not possible because your crying holds me back.” And so the mother stops.
I love this story, because it’s also like an education. All these stories are like education. You have to say, “It’s okay. They’re dead.” And Betty, in this movie, she can’t do this. In the scene where the husband and son see this extra plate at the dining table, they think she is back in her trauma, and then they hear someone, a noise in the kitchen. At this moment, they believe in ghosts.
We started by talking about music. I wanted to end by asking about the use of the Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons song “The Night.”
I heard it in this Portuguese movie.
The Tsugua Diaries (2021), by Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro. The film actually premiered here in Cannes, also in the Directors’ Fortnight.
Oh really? I liked this song so much. That movie is set during COVID-19 confinement, so it’s in a way also a movie about a group of people who are imprisoned. For three minutes, the song opens a window to a better life.
I like that in your film, we’re watching the characters as they listen to the song.
The actors have their script, they have their characters, they have their lines. But for this moment, I said to them, “We’ll make a very simple thing. You’re just listening to music, and we are filming you with two cameras.” And they were afraid, because they had no lines, they had no identity. But I like these moments when they are lost. When they start laughing in the scene, they are not [the characters] Laura and Max. They are [the actors] Paula and Enno. This breaking gives them freedom for a moment. And I used the same song for the end credits, to remind us of this moment of freedom.
There’s another thing I borrowed in this film. In the final scene, when they’re eating eggs on the porch, it’s from The Deer Hunter (1978), where they’re also eating eggs, and they’re singing the American hymn [“God Bless America”].
Did you show your actors any films before shooting? I know you often do that.
Just one this time: The Son’s Room (2001) by Nanni Moretti. In the final scene of that film, after the parents bring the girlfriend of their dead son to the border of Italy and France, they’re on the beach, and everybody’s alone and together at the same time. It’s a moment that has always stayed with me. That scene was actually shot in Menton, not far from where we are now.
Dennis Lim is the artistic director of the New York Film Festival and the author of Tale of Cinema (2022) and David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (2015).
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