To date, Christian Petzold has proven to be a master of the modern European anti-thriller, crafting movies that generate remarkable tension despite their general lack of the sorts of aesthetic tics that help make thrillers so gripping. Using little to no music, deliberate and calm camera movements and placements, Petzold has crafted a series of paranoid, abstract ruminations on personal and national identity. As such, it’s easy to think that his latest, Undine, will play out as another macabre, unnerving experience. It opens at a café at the tail end of a conversation in which Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) has just broken up with Undine (Paula Beer), a historian who works at a museum across the street. Johannes, clearly checked out of this relationship and preoccupied with a new lover, is nonchalant about moving on, but Undine broods over his remarks before telling him, calmly but sternly, that if he leaves her, she will kill him.
On its face, this introductory scene, and Undine’s spying glances from the museum as she attempts to see whether Johannes has left or not after she goes back to work, suggests a jilted lover thriller in which a woman goes mad from jealousy and heartbreak. But Petzold quickly pivots into stranger territory. A retelling of the myth of the water nymph who kills human lovers who abandon her, Undine starts to stack curious, almost surreal details that complicate the otherwise simple portrait of a woman struggling with a breakup. Much of this shift occurs when Undine’s rage is quickly displaced by meeting Christoph (Franz Rogowski), an industrial diver who works on mending the various manmade structures below the surface of Berlin’s Spree River. The two have a bizarre meet-cute in which Christoph inadvertently breaks the aquarium of Undine’s favorite café that exposes an elemental, serene relationship that the woman has to water, which leads to increasingly odd sights like Christoph spotting a dedication to Undine etched into one of the underwater pipes he finds, or of Undine diving with him only to take off her breathing tank and gear to perform a kind of dance with a giant catfish that roams the river.
Such inexplicable moments shove the film outside of Petzold’s usual suspense framework and toward romance. And just as the director can wring unbearable tension from a deceptively sedate style, so too does his deliberate, classical method convey unexpected depths of passion between Christoph and Undine. Following Petzold’s two most explicitly political features, Undine returns the filmmaker to his more abstract, evocative roots, tracing the roiling emotions underneath his characters’ placid surfaces. But he is nonetheless still concerned with his ongoing political interests; Undine occasionally gives presentations to tourists in a room filled with giant models of Berlin from various points in its modern history, including a layout that uses color coding to identify the existing buildings in the city that predate its 1990 reunification and those that have since been constructed. The juxtaposition of Undine’s status as a guide through Berlin’s contemporary architectural history and her own connection to a much deeper, mythic story of the pre-civilized land broadens the horizons of Petzold’s prevailing interest in Germany’s post-WWII identity.
These moments of quiet reflection help to give the film some shape while stressing its unpredictable rhythms. In a way, such political preoccupations and the distractions they introduce prefigure the film’s final act, in which the seemingly straightforward romance is upended, first with a genre-typical big misunderstanding and then with an increasingly startling slip into dream logic as Undine’s folkloric properties begin to assert themselves. The darker edges that have always existed in Petzold’s work at last emerge, albeit in a wildly different context, embracing the murkier side of the passion that otherwise renders this his sweetest and most elegant feature to date.
Petzold has long been linked to the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock with his charged psychological dramas and muted but powerful thriller structures. But it is perhaps more accurate to say that he is more tethered to the long tradition of post-Hitchcockian European filmmakers who have long prodded at seams of the British master’s style. In his reckoning with Germany’s 20th-century history, the director recalls Wim Wenders’ early works like My American Friend, while Phoenix’s plays on identity and doubling can be tied as much to Hitchcock as to the likes of Brian De Palma and Jacques Rivette. Rivette in particular is a major touchstone of Undine, reflected in the film’s use of the quotidian and real to suggest the fantastical and folkloric just around every corner. And in the way the film throws itself into the inflamed passions that grow between Undine and Christoph, it suggests that romance, with all its ups and downs, is every bit as otherworldly as Undine’s transmogrifying, mythic self.
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