German director Christian Petzold, the Chabrol of modern European cinema, delivers an elegant and disquieting psychological mystery of the sort that doesn’t interest today’s British film-makers, though this one appears to have more than a taste of PD James or Ruth Rendell. There’s also a hint of Joseph Losey’s Accident. It is about family dysfunction and grief and unnervingly lays out the aftermath of a sudden violent trauma. The faint suggestion that the film itself has gone into a kind of shock could have layered the proceedings with something infinitesimally dreamlike and unreal, an atmosphere often to be found in Petzold’s films. What makes this film interesting is that it isn’t heading for a macabre twist or chilling denouement but something positive and even redemptive.
Petzold’s longtime female lead Paula Beer plays Laura, a brilliant pianist studying music in Berlin, clearly in a fragile and depressed state. We are ultimately to see her on stage performing the third movement of Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs, the dreamily rippling A Boat on the Ocean, which gives the film its title. Paula is stuck in an unhappy relationship with boorish would-be music mogul Jakob (Philip Froissant), who one tense afternoon loses control of his open-topped sports car in the Brandenburg countryside. The results are catastrophic for Jakob, but Laura, thrown clear from the passenger seat, miraculously survives with hardly more than a scratch.
That isn’t all. Just before the crash, Laura had briefly locked eyes with a hypnotically intense woman standing by the roadside as their car zoomed by, staring, perhaps even grieving, as if she has predicted or maybe willed the imminent disaster. This is Betty, played by Barbara Auer (an intense presence also in Petzold’s earlier movie Transit). Betty offers to let the badly shaken Laura stay with her; they appear to set up home in Betty’s pleasant but run-down house, oddly without Laura being bothered by the authorities needing her to testify in any inquest. Betty lives alone but seems to have clothes in Laura’s size – a young person’s jeans and T-shirts – and encourages Laura to play the piano that she owns but doesn’t play herself.
Betty appears to be semi-estranged from her husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and grownup son Max (Enno Trebs), who run a dodgy car-repair workshop and don’t play the piano either. And in the film’s one moment of out-and-out unsubtlety, Betty even accidentally calls her new guest “Yelena” before correcting that to “Laura”.
Can’t Laura see what’s going on? Petzold repeatedly shows us moments in which Betty, Richard and Max try to conceal things from her, or whisper little secrets, but Laura always catches them out. Could it be that she knows what is happening and is silently complicit? Betty may be an emotionally damaged emotional parasite or predator, but so might Laura. It is highly diverting, elegantly contrived study of an unhappy family group and the cuckoo in its nest.
• Miroirs No 3 is in UK cinemas from 17 April.
