The great German writer-director Christian Petzold has a number of recurring fixations: women in trouble, doomed romance, the specters of a grim past hovering over an unsettled present. In film after mysterious, melancholy film, he's shuffled and reshuffled these noirish elements, placing them in revealing new configurations even when he sometimes relies on the same faces. In his brilliant 2019 drama, "Transit," Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer played two almost-lovers caught in a kind of temporal loop: It was a wartime melodrama that kept running in circles, turning its characters into captives of history or genre or both.
Beer and Rogowski are back in Petzold's strange, steadily entrancing new picture, "Undine," only this time there's nothing "almost" about their love story and nothing uncertain about their time frame. We are in present-day Berlin, though Undine Wibeau (Beer) dips frequently into the past in her work as a historian and guide, explaining how the city's recent development reflects and sometimes conceals the scars of its war-ravaged history. You wouldn't necessarily guess, from her smart black suit and her nimble recitations, that she is in fact the Undine, the water sprite of ancient European lore whose love for a human has granted her human form. That's where this movie's sly conceptual gambit â and almost every Petzold movie has one â comes into play.