Mirrors No. 3 ending: Petzold filmed Laura coming back with her bags, then reshot the whole thing six months later
Christian Petzold shot the ending he'd been proud of for years, watched it once in the edit — and binned it, exactly as his leading lady had warned him he would.
Christian Petzold had never reshot anything in over three decades of filmmaking. Mirrors No. 3 — his slender chamber piece about Laura (Paula Beer), a Berlin piano student taken in by a stranger named Betty after a car crash kills her boyfriend — broke that streak, and the director has been disarmingly happy to explain why.
The ending that died at the fence
In the script, the film closed on an image Petzold adored: the family on their porch, and Laura at the gate, luggage in hand, returning for good. He's recited the script's final line in interviews like a man picking at a scab:
"She opens the gate and intrudes into the life of the family."
He shot it. Then he sat in the edit with Bettina Böhler, his long-time editor, watched it once, and knew it was a catastrophic mistake — ninety minutes of a woman searching for herself, resolved by filing her under "daughter" in someone else's household. By his own account the realisation cost him a fortnight of depression, and the fix cost a reshoot six months after the final scene had wrapped — the first of his career. The discarded image, incidentally, was a borrowed one: an homage to a Claude Sautet film in which Romy Schneider returns to stand at a fence. Some endings belong to other people's films.
Told you so, said Paula Beer
The truly humbling part: he'd been warned. Half a year before cameras rolled, Beer and co-star Enno Trebs came to his office, drank his coffee, and told him the ending was wrong — they couldn't see why Laura would go back. Petzold, who admits he bristles when actors criticise a script, shot his version anyway, then found himself ringing Beer from the edit suite to concede. He has said he felt "totally ashamed"; at the New York Film Festival Q&A he told the whole story unprompted. The practical comedy of the redo: by then Beer was heavily pregnant, so the new epilogue had to be framed with some care.
The film around all this, for the record:
- Premiered in Cannes' Directors' Fortnight in 2025, then spent a year drifting through cinemas worldwide, gathering the best reviews of Petzold's recent run.
- The set-up: Betty (Barbara Auer) nurses Laura back to health; her husband and son run a garage with a sideline in odometer fraud; a dead daughter-shaped absence explains why Betty needs Laura rather more than she lets on.
- The title is Ravel — the third of his Miroirs, which Laura plays — and Frankie Valli's "The Night" bookends the film, because Petzold wanted that song to release his actors twice.
The finished ending keeps the grief and drops the adoption: both women arrive at the same recognition — that their time together is over — and Laura leaves as herself, not as anyone's replacement daughter. Petzold, for his part, has moved on to something defiantly modest: a 90-minute crime story for German television, because prime-time Sunday, he says, is where you get to not be alone.
Earlier we wrote: Robert Pattinson's To Catch a Predator film shot several different endings