New York Film Festival Review: ‘Miroirs No. 3’

Miroirs No. 3

The 63rd New York Film Festival opens September 26, 2025. Already, many cineophiles have purchased tickets to previews with Q&As, selling out most of the festival. At the festival website one can keep track of screenings still available during and after the festival.

This year in the Main Slate section renowned German director Christian Petzold (Undine, Afire) presents his stark, spare, atmospheric film Miroirs No. 3. Making its U.S. premiere after screening at the Cannes Film Festival and Toronto Film Festival, the film, which Petzold also wrote, continues his theme of ghostly presences impacting and haunting opaque characters. Through the theme of loss he explores questions about spiritual consciousness, broken humanity, inner dislocation and the slow road to recovery after trauma.

In French “miroirs” means mirrors or reflections. The film title also references Maurice Ravel’s five-movement piano suite, which relates to the main character Laura (Paula Beer), a pianist from Berlin in a state of reflection and dislocation. We follow Laura’s transition from a state of unquiet to a place of settlement.

A strange acknowledgement

As Laura and her boyfriend Jakob (Philip Froissant) travel through the isolated countryside to meet friends in the city, they pass a woman with a haunted look. Laura and the woman, who stands in front of a forlorn-looking house, stare at each other as if in recognition. Jakob speeds by ignoring the woman. When the couple arrive at their destination and meet their friends, Laura begs off the weekend, explaining that she feels sick and can’t stay.

Annoyed, Jakob drives her to where she can return home, but fate intervenes. First, he nearly runs over the same woman (Betty, portrayed by Barbara Auer), who again stands by the road and stares at Laura. Moments later we hear the sounds of a car crash. When Betty runs to investigate, she finds Jakob dead and Laura, whom EMT responders rescue at Betty’s request, miraculously alive. The EMT agrees with Laura that she doesn’t require medical attention, so they don’t bring her to the hospital.

Laura’s guilt

However, the trauma upended Laura because she feels guilty about indirectly causing Jakob’s death. When she asks to stay with Betty instead of going to the hospital, Betty welcomes her and helps to assuage Laura’s guilt. Over the next days Betty nurtures Laura. Not only does she care for her physical needs (food, showers, clothing), she provides her with a peaceful, calm routine environment in which to rest emotionally and spiritually.

But mysteries surround Betty’s willing acceptance of Laura and Laura’s acceptance of Betty’s comfort and attention. The house looks like a farmhouse in need of updating, but its quaintness provides the atmosphere and isolation that Laura finds restorative. The film carefully withholds information. Because the women don’t share backstories, we question the relationship they forge, which appears to be on another, ethereal level of consciousness.

A turning point

The details of the women’s humanity slowly unravel in an atmosphere thick with mystery. Cinematically, the film focuses on stillness, the spare homespun nature of Betty’s house, the rooms, and Laura’s place in them. The quietude contributes to Laura’s restoration with attention to the mundane as Laura helps Betty with an unpainted fence and unkempt herb garden. Then the film startles us with a revelation about Betty when Laura offers to make a special dish that Betty can’t prepare. Betty suggests she will invite her husband and son to share in Laura’s delicious dumplings. We wonder why the son and husband don’t live with her.

Shortly after, they’re joined by Betty’s husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and son Max (Enno Trebs), whose questioning looks as they sit down to dinner and Betty’s self-satisfaction indicate a trauma may have occurred to this family. Thus, Betty and Laura have found a mutual helping connection which unfolds through clues and eventually explodes in a violent event and confrontation.

Paced storytelling

Petzold’s paced, clever storytelling quickens our attention and engages us because the characters move in their interior spaces and reveal little because they can’t. We sense that much has been said previously in argument and hurt. Though we attempt to figure out what has fractured this family and hope that Laura’s presence may bring them back together because she has found a place there, it is not to be. Petzold once more shakes us from this fantasy and the son reveals the tragic truth about what happened.

The conclusion explains one mystery, but Petzold leaves unexplained why Laura stays with the family as long as she does when she has a family of her own. The director’s fascination with human connections that can’t readily be deciphered is beautifully expressed in Miroirs No. 3.