This family resembles mine

If we were to make a bet on whether Pedro Almodóvar likes Espejos 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 comic moments that disrupt it, like in the cinema of the Mancha native. But the German Christian Petzold sets himself a challenge that runs parallel to those of Almodóvar's latest films: trying to make an implausible, even ridiculous, plot believable on screen.

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

Deliberately small and mysterious, Espejos nº 3 is a film about a foreign 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-integrated references, just as Pedro Almodóvar likes it.