Christian Petzold is one of my favorite directors working today, and part of this might come from hearing his interviews. Because he’s such a charismatic, hilarious person to listen to. It might be surprising to those familiar with more than a few of his films. Still, his knowledge and love of movies are just so infectious.

Like many of us, he is plagued by the condition of always seeing movies through other movies. And this applies to his own films, too. Except he also has an aptitude for literature and music, while layering in ideas buried deep within the German cultural consciousness.

There is so much to like about his work. How he’s built out his own stock company, including long-term collaborators like Nina Hoss and Paula Beer. He’s distinctly reliable; his movies are always economical and still pregnant with so many worthwhile themes.

As best as I can describe it, they are grounded in the real world with real people, and still, somehow, we witness the kind of mysteries on screen only movies can provide. In the same way, you know, watching his movies, images have meaning, and they are there for a reason. We have mirrors, we have refractions, even dreams.

This movie’s inciting incident comes when a woman (Barbara Auer) overhears a nearby car accident and races to the scene. The young man (Philip Froissant) driving the car was killed instantly. His girlfriend, thrown from the car, lies nearby in shock, but almost without a scratch. It’s one of many uncanny events in the story.

The middle-aged woman, Barbara, comes to her aid. She’s going to fetch an ambulance, but this young music student, Laura (Paula Beer), asks her not to leave. From then on, they form a bit of a symbiotic relationship out of the wreckage.

A red sports car is meant to evoke the car crash in Contempt as much as the iconography of The Graduate. Why are those there exactly? It’s in conversation with film history. Jean-Luc Godard, Brigitte Bardot, Mike Nichols, and Dustin Hoffman. The music does the same, be it Ravel or Frankie Valli.

Miroirs No. 3 is a film that betrays so many elements of disrepair. A fence needing painting, a la Tom Sawyer. A dripping faucet gone kaput. A bicycle with a busted seat and an out-of-tune piano.

There is so much existing on the fringes, unexplained, even inscrutable, with the screen logic of a Hitchcock thriller in the countryside. We have very little background for Laura or Barbara, for that matter. Instead, we are offered the opportunity to watch, learn, and respond in kind.

Barbara brings Laura into her home and allows her to recuperate, doting over her with quiet compassion. At the same time, there is a felt absence around an unseen girl named Yelena and a noticeable dissolution of a family.

Why do the father (Matthias Brandt) and son (Enno Trebs) no longer live with the woman of the house? Instead, they come over and have dinner after a day of work at their nearby garage. It’s awkward and stunted, and then Laura comes in with a special meal, and they don’t quite know what to do or say.

So they eat together in silence before doing odd jobs around the home, like fixing the dishwasher. This is what they’re comfortable with, and it is another expression of care. Certainly, external injury and broken appliances need repairing, but there is simultaneous work needing to be done on the interior of these lives, Laura’s included.

I know Petzold stuck “The Night” by Frankie Valli in his film because he likes The Deer Hunter, and that film features “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.” It’s a sprawling working-class movie. The context feels so far away from what he is crafting, and yet there is a shared understanding of how this music can develop these incubated moments of joy amid trauma.

But Petzold also enjoys the act of people listening to music. There are no bits of business or shrouds of performance they can put up. At their very best, the actors are laid bare. It’s small, seemingly inconsequential, but it is a kind of visual exposition for us as understanding builds in an interlude between Laura and Max. Then, the darkness breaks in again, and the light is momentarily extinguished.

Despite this tension, I kept on thinking about what a different perspective Petzold gives to the modern domestic movie. With the likes of fellow auteur Bong Joon Ho, it’s easy to look at the landscape and distrust strangers as the parasites move in. Petzold upends this and makes us think maybe strangers can actually give something to us. Or there might be something deeper in need of excavation and then refurbishment.

At the same time, there are the reverberations of Vertigo and themes related to the remaking of people. One image in the place of another image, in this case, Laura for the unseen daughter. Except Laura has so much to offer on her own, and in many ways, down to the very last frame, this is her movie, thanks to the hypnotic presence of Beer.

It’s easy to call a movie like this minor, but it uses its space sagaciously, and it has bounties in the intermittent passages that a lot of larger spectacles never quite discover. Ironically, they don’t have time.

It feels like Petzold at his very best precisely because it fits in concert with all his work, and in feeling small, it suggests what it needs to in such a perplexing, even exciting way.

Watching Miroirs No. 3 is another stirring reminder of why I continue coming back to movies and why Petzold remains one of my modern-day favorites. If you are new to his filmography, please give his earlier work with Nina Hoss a watch, and if you have the opportunity, watch his interviews.

In the hands of some people, films can come off pretentious, but I appreciate the care and creativity the writer-director puts into every story he writes. There’s a personal spark to them, fully alive and made in the tradition of all his favorite films that came before. Because he is a fan just like us, and he lets this shine through everything he does.

4/5 Stars