The director of Transit returns with a somewhat pointless film about an art historian who has a passionate affair with a diver
Christian Petzold’s Undine is an intriguing, bemusing oddity of a film: a suspense drama-thriller with a fey supernatural twist. It’s a sphinx that, if not exactly without a secret, has less of a secret than it thinks it has. And it is possible to come away from the film less than convinced, but very impressed by the sheer force of Petzold’s film-making talent (recently so stunning in his drama Transit) but which has been here deployed for something which is a bit flimsy and silly.
Paula Beer plays Undine who, as her name suggests, may have intense sympathies with water. She lives in Berlin, and is a stylish and elegant historian who lectures on the city’s architectural history at the
Berlin City Models exhibition. But she is also conducting an unhappy adulterous affair with Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), which is reaching its unhappy end at the film’s opening - revealing a flash of something angry and even violent in Undine.