Miroirs No. 3

Visibly unsettled from the film’s early frames, Berlin-based piano student Laura (Paula Beer) is further shaken by a fatal car crash during a trip to the country. Physically unhurt but emotionally unstable, Laura is taken in by a local woman, Betty (Barbara Auer), with whom she develops an easy rapport. But when Laura meets Betty’s husband and son, she soon finds herself in an increasingly strange family situation.

With this eerie, enigmatic, economical psychodrama, German director Christian Petzold returns to the Hitchcockian inspiration present in Phoenix, this time adding a gentle twist to the uncanny doublings of Vertigo by layering on the familial disquiet of Shadow of a Doubt. A standout at the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at Cannes, Miroirs No. 3 marks Petzold’s fourth collaboration with Paula Beer (Transit, Undine, Afire), who turns in a performance at once inscrutable and emotionally resonant. Titled after a composition by Maurice Ravel, the film is a masterful study of grief and the unusual things we do to cope with it.

This is a work that is mellifluous, melodious and mysterious in equal measure.

David Jenkins, Little White Lies

A beguiling psychodrama about familial fractures, slippery identity, and the difficult means by which people move on from tragedy.

Nick Schager, Daily Beast