anywhere out of the world: Chronicle of Mirros No3 (Petzhold’s Domestic Opera of Nothingness)

Mirros No3, or How to Die of Drama Without Really Dying

If cinema is a mirror held up to life, then Mirros No3 is more like one of those mirrors in a faded provincial carnival: warped, wobbling, leaving you with the faint suspicion that the operator ran off with your ticket money.

Petzhold’s Mirros No3 arrives wrapped in mystery. The title alone suggests labyrinths of reflections, terrible secrets, perhaps a gothic chamber where truth fractures like glass.

One enters the cinema braced for horror, for scandal, for something so dirty that it will never wash out.

And then… we get a family drama.

Yes, there is a death, and yes, there is trauma—but Petzhold treats these like a stern schoolteacher who confiscates the candy just before recess.

The scandal never arrives. Instead, we sit at the table of grief with relatives who speak in ellipses, drink mineral water with great intensity, and stare at each other as if hypnotized by Ikea lamps.

The main feast is, of course, Barbara Auer. A very fine actress who here seems guided by acting direction from the school of “More! Louder! Pretend you are Medea even when asking for the TV remote!”

She storms and trembles with the force of a Wagner soprano, bringing operatic fury to a role that demands, at most, a resigned sigh.

The effect is so theatrical that one half-expects surtitles to appear at the bottom of the screen.

Out of place? Out of orbit. It’s not acting—it’s a cosmic event.

And then hovering like a cinematic law of gravity: Paula Beer.

She appears once again, as she does in approximately 75% of all German productions. Beer has become the universal plug-in actress for every female character between 18 and 80.

Daughter? Beer. Mother? Beer. Grandmother with arthritis and a secret garden? Beer with a shawl. She is omnipresent, the patron saint of German melancholy.

In Mirros No3, she floats through the frames like wallpaper—beautiful wallpaper, yes, but wallpaper all the same.

So what do we get when you mix Auer’s thunderclap melodrama with Beer’s inevitable ubiquity and Petzhold’s barren script?

A film that promises a dirty secret and delivers instead a family melodrama reheated from last week’s leftovers. A death, a trauma, a table covered in tense silences—and acting so overwrought it practically shakes the projector.

In the end, Mirros No3 is less a movie than a mirror held up to German cinema itself: cracked, theatrical, omnipresently Beer-flavored, and barren of scandal.