Christian Petzold’s beguiling and restorative new drama “Miroirs No. 3” begins with a look and a automobile crash.

Wreckage and its long-term aftermath have lengthy marked the flicks of Petzold, arguably Germany’s foremost filmmaker. In his best and most exquisitely haunting movie, 2014’s “Phoenix,” an Auschwitz survivor and cabaret singer (Nina Hoss, colossally good) returns unrecognized to her German hometown with a reconstructed face, to a husband who’s mentioned to have betrayed her to the Nazis.

“Miroirs No. 3” doesn’t have that movie’s grandiosity of melodrama; it’s extra of a flippantly enigmatic chamber piece. Nevertheless it’s likewise preoccupied with piecing life collectively once more after tragedy, and possibly discovering some catharsis in music. (The title comes from a Ravel piano piece.) And its startling energy will, like “Phoenix,” sneak up on you.

Laura (Paula Beer, the star of Petzold’s “Undine” and “Transit”), a piano pupil from Berlin, is reluctantly driving within the backseat of a automobile. Our first glimpse of her, earlier than this street journey, was staring blankly, possibly suicidally, right into a river. With Laura is her musician boyfriend, Jakob (Philip Froissant) and a producer that Jakob is hoping to impress. As they drive by way of the countryside, Laura locks eyes with a solitary middle-aged lady standing exterior her dwelling. For a fleeting second they share a mysterious connection, possibly of some shared pressure of despair.

Quickly after, Laura says she desires to return to Berlin and Jakob, aggravated, drives her to the closest practice station. However simply after once more passing the identical lady’s home, they skid off the street in a wreck that kills Jakob and throws Laura from the automobile. The lady runs to assist. After the paramedics arrive and deal with a nonetheless dazed Laura, they’re stunned at her request. She asks if she will keep on the lady’s home, relatively than go to the hospital.

What follows is a sweetly indirect, even dreamlike interlude of recuperation. Nevertheless it’s not simply Laura’s. It’s additionally therapeutic for the lady who fortunately takes her in. Betty is her title, and Barbara Auer’s efficiency is as deft and delicate as any you’re prone to see this yr. Their time collectively is spent not discussing their very own traumas, however with gentle, unstated kindnesses and every day routine.

Petzold, who additionally wrote the script, is masterful at meting out backstory. He does it in a manner that by no means seems like withholding to the viewers or girding for an enormous twist, however stays tied to the psychology of his characters. As a lot as his movies would possibly ebb and stream with grief and restoration, their spine is that of a thriller. Petzold, an excellent admirer of Hitchcock and “Vertigo,” specifically, makes motion pictures the place id, relatively than folks, can go lacking.

The supply of Betty’s ache isn’t revealed till nicely into “Miroirs,” but it surely’s not exhausting to guess at. We study that her husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and their grownup son Max (Enno Trebs) — auto mechanics who look skeptically on Laura’s arrival — stay separate of Betty. In the meantime, Betty provides Laura her daughter’s garments to put on, and encourages her to play the piano her daughter used to. Collectively, they paint a fence and restore a herb backyard.

Unusual as their home life may appear, one thing heat and good is happening. We have now the sensation Richard and Max haven’t been round a lot, although their store is only a bike journey away. However the 4 quickly start to virtually resemble a household unit. In a film about two girls who intuitively perceive one another, Brandt and Trebs are charmingly oafish as males who’re keen to repair a dishwasher however much less eager on the right way to restore trauma.

That this idyll is sure to run out, in the end, goes with out saying. However whereas one other filmmaker would possibly steer such a narrative towards both catastrophe or, extra possible, schmaltz, Petzold ends “Miroirs” with out sacrificing the ambiguous grace that got here earlier than. And he turns “Miroirs,” a slender and candy 86-minute puzzle, into one of many extra pretty and profound little motion pictures about how hearts could be mended by simply opening a door.

“Miroirs No. 3,” a 1-2 Particular launch in theaters, is just not rated by the Movement Image Affiliation. In German, with subtitles. Working time: 86 minutes. Three and a half stars out of 4.