This family is like mine

If we had to bet on whether Pedro Almodóvar likes or dislikes Mirrors No. 3, the recommendation from film betting houses would be to put a few euros on yes. Perhaps it's a film without pop inertia and without melodramatic or comedic moments to disrupt it, as in the cinema of the man from La Mancha. But the German Christian Petzold sets himself a challenge that runs parallel to those of Almodóvar's latest films: to try to make an implausible, even ridiculous, plot believable on screen.

With an incongruous and hardly realistic plot, Mirrors No. 3 explains how a young woman who survives a car accident in the north German countryside is adopted, so to speak, by a family living by the roadside where she almost lost her life. Everything is very unusual, even absurd. The young woman (a always magnetic Paula Beer) does not seem very affected by the death of her partner in the same accident, and the family hides a secret that makes the relationships between its members, to say the least, peculiar.

Voluntarily small and mysterious, Mirrors No. 3 is a film about a strange body introduced into an already strange family dynamic. This film about the reflections between presences and absences also includes a game of formal and plot mirrors with certain works by Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph Losey, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nanni Moretti, and John Cassavetes. Many well-introduced references, just as Pedro Almodóvar likes it.