After the ambitious period experiments Phoenix and Transit, writer-director Christian Petzold shifts to a lower gear with Undine, a contemporary riff on the ancient legend of the same name, about a water nymph who becomes human when she falls in love with a man. The scale is smaller and the concerns more intimate, but the movie still pulses with Petzold’s unique combination of mystery and intelligence.
The movie also reunites Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski of Transit. She plays Undine, a Berlin historian and lecturer who specializes in the post-Cold War reunification of the city; he plays Christoph, an industrial diver repairing a dam outside of Berlin. They meet immediately after Undine has been dispatched by a callous lover, instantly fall hard for each other (a broken aquarium is involved in the meet-cute), and embark on a passionate romance that nevertheless exists under the shadow of the legend’s curse. (If abandoned by the man she transformed for, the mythological Undine must kill him and return to the water.)
From the opening breakup scene (with Jacob Matschenz as Undine’s soon-to-be-ex), Beer makes it clear that Undine is a woman who feels things intensely. Much of it is in her eyes, which are still, focused, deep—aquatic, in a way, even before Petzold begins to weave in watery visual motifs. Rogowski’s Christoph is an infatuated puppy dog, running alongside Undine’s train as it arrives and nuzzling into her neck. They’re the sort of couple who seem so thoroughly engrossed in each other that you fear for the moment the outside world inevitably breaks in.
Petzold foreshadows this in a couple of clever ways, including having Bach’s piano Concerto in D Minor rudely interrupted here and there by passing cars or rushing trains. The sound design is sophisticated throughout, especially during the handful of underwater scenes, where the audio is at once muffled and throbbing, combining claustrophobia and possibility.
I won’t spoil what we see underwater, or guess at what it fully means. Much like Transit, Undine is open to interpretation, with myth, genre, and German history all providing potential paths. At heart—and given how much time the movie spends on Undine’s lectures, which detail the structural upheavals Berlin has undergone throughout its history—the movie considers what it means to move on, to reconcile with the past while creating a new future. For both a city and a person. And, perhaps, a sea nymph.
