What’s so wrong about a little parasocial bonding, as long as you keep it friendly? That’s the question at the heart of Christian Petzold’s latest understated arthouse thriller, which feels remarkably minor even by his standards. Miroirs No. 3 continues Petzold’s ongoing collaboration with actress Paula Beer, who’s been working as his go-to muse since Undine at the start of the decade. Beer stars as a lonely woman at the outskirts of the music industry, alienated by the careerist ambitions of her boyfriend and the sycophantic obligations of making connections with other go-getter urbanites. While on a weekend getaway in the German countryside, the uneasy couple get into a gnarly car accident, leaving Beer’s aspiring pianist concussed, alone, and presumably in mourning. She’s then taken in by a rural family who appear to be generous in providing her a bed to recover in but eventually prove to have their own selfish motivations in the supposed charity act. As she pieces her life back together in the days after the accident, it becomes clear that she’s being modeled to fulfil a domestic role in the home left vacant by another woman her own age, and she’s unwittingly become an integral part of a family unit she initially assumed she was just visiting. Whether that forced-family dynamic is menacing or comforting is up for interpretation, as everyone involved discovers in their own time.
Miroirs No. 3 might play with the themes & tensions of a classic Hitchcock thriller (most notably, Vertigo), but its scene-to-scene conflict is largely quiet, requiring an active patience from its audience that Hitchcock would never take for granted. On the genre scale, it’s more closely aligned with recent Euro thrillers like When Fall is Coming, Misericordia, and Sibyl than any of the classic Hitchcock titles they might individually recall. It’s cozier than it is thrilling. All action beats are heard offscreen, never seen. Even the dialogue is quiet & sparse, with most of the conflict between members of this makeshift family conveyed via meaningful stares. From the very start, Paula Beer’s concussed protagonist is characterized as a passenger, riding silently in cars and making passing eye contact with strangers so inhumanly stoic they practically function as specters of Death. The way she finds a place where she feels welcome & settled enough to call home might be morally perverse (given that her new foster family pressures her to unwittingly take the place of another missing woman), but there’s genuine temptation in continuing to play house there. The audience stews in the discomfort of figuring out who she’s replacing, whether she’ll accept the role, and what her new fake family will do if she rejects them. Petzold’s gamble is in hoping that discomfort is enough to sustain our attention without having to pacify us with onscreen acts of violence like, say, a car crash.
Petzold’s films are a little too deliberately understated to fully register as major movie events to the world at large, but previous titles like Phoenix, Transit, Afire, and the aforementioned Undine all mean a lot to a few. Miroirs No. 3 will undoubtedly be the Movie of the Year for a certain kind of movie nerd who’s dying to share a beer with Paula Beer, offering several memeable moments of her cracking open some cold ones for anyone who’d be interested in such a thing. For everyone previously unfamiliar with the Beer-and-Petzolds name brand, it’ll likely pass by like a gentle breeze — pleasant but hardly noticed.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 