Christian Petzold’s Mirrors No. 3 drifts like a quiet spell through grief and substitution, asking whether healing means becoming whole—or simply inhabiting the hollow shape someone else left behind.
It begins like a ghost story—only there are no ghosts. A woman stands by the roadside, silent and motionless. A glance from a passing car lingers just a second too long. Then: a crash we never see, a life lost, and another mysteriously absorbed into someone else’s home. Christian Petzold’s Mirrors No. 3, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight (Quinzaine des cinéastes) at Cannes 2025, unfolds like a dream. It is a film about how we survive trauma—not by erasing the past, but by gently reframing it. When absence becomes too heavy to bear, someone unknowingly steps in to fill its shape. Petzold’s film—the final installment of his elemental trilogy after Undine (2020) and Afire (Roter Himmel, 2023)—asks an aching question: do we heal through connection, or through substitution? Once again, Paula Beer leads the narrative as a woman suspended between identities.
Laura (Paula Beer), emotionally fragile, survives a tragic car accident that kills her boyfriend Jakob (Philip Froissant). Stumbling away from the wreckage, she meets Betty (Barbara Auer), a calm but enigmatic woman who lost her daughter Yelena to suicide. When Laura timidly asks if she can stay in Betty’s countryside home, the request catches the older woman off guard—but she agrees. And in that moment, an unspoken pact is formed: Laura needs shelter, and Betty needs something else—someone to embody the daughter she still sees in the hallway.
Soon, Laura wears Yelena’s clothes. She sits at her piano. She moves through the house like a quiet echo of what once was. For Betty, it is a bittersweet balm. In Laura, she finds a reflection of her lost child—a reason to care again, to feel again. A fleeting return to the life she once knew. But this silent arrangement, however comforting to the mother, begins to unravel around the men. Richard (Matthias Brandt), the father, senses a disruption in the natural order. Max (Enno Trebs), the son, starts to develop feelings for Laura—not as a sister, but as a woman—which leads to a quiet internal conflict: how can one love someone who wears the ghost of your sister like a second skin?
Petzold resists all melodrama. His dialogue is sparse, subtle, and organic. The house—with its warm wood, gentle garden, and ever-present breeze—feels suspended in time. There is no grand reveal, no catharsis, only life continuing under the weight of what is not said.
Laura’s presence is not simply metaphorical. She is a living mirror for Betty’s grief, a surrogate for Yelena, a way to momentarily soften the sharpness of absence. The absurdities of domestic life—small meals, bicycle repairs, shared silences—bring flickers of comfort. And yet, a quiet unease simmers beneath it all. Was Laura just a temporary balm? Did Betty need her to truly see Laura—or just the image she projected onto her? Petzold once again centers a female protagonist, continuing the thematic current of his trilogy. Mirrors No. 3 breathes with the question of presence: to be, or to seem. To belong, or to substitute. Laura’s time in this house becomes a liminal space—between memory and renewal, between being someone and becoming herself again. Mirrors No. 3 may appear simple, but it lingers with impossible questions. How do we mourn without turning the living into replacements? When does love become projection?
The final scene leaves us with Paula Beer’s now-signature enigmatic smile—she walks away not as Yelena, but as Laura, full again after having been hollow.
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