Christian Petzold named the curse. Then he made a film that enacts it.
“She has to go back in the water and wait for the next man to come along. She exists only through men, and that is a horrible curse. Our story aims to explore an Undine who is struggling against this.”
— Christian Petzold, on why he made Undine
The film ends with Christoph returning to Monika. Undine is in the water. Christoph dives down, sees her briefly in the dark, surfaces, and walks back to where his pregnant partner is waiting. He embraces her. He is holding the small figurine of a diver that Undine gave him. The camera does not follow Undine.
She is there, below the surface, having killed Johannes to release Christoph from death, having returned to the water as the myth compels her, and the film’s final emotional movement is about what Christoph does next. The film that set out to explore an Undine struggling against the cycle of existing only through men ends with the man’s life continuing, complicated and enriched by her, and Undine back in the water, where Petzold told us she always ends up, waiting for the next one to come along.
Undine, written and directed by Petzold and released in 2020, stars Paula Beer as Undine Wibeau, a historian who lectures on Berlin’s urban development — a woman who has watched the city be built and demolished and rebuilt over centuries, because she has been here through most of it. She is broken up with at the film’s opening by Johannes (Jacob Matschenz). She tells him: “If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you.” It is not a threat. It is a statement of myth-bound fact, spoken with the weariness of someone who has said it before. The aquarium in the café explodes, and through the flood of water and broken glass Christoph (Franz Rogowski), an industrial diver who attended her lecture, finds her on the floor and they look at each other for the first time.
What follows is one of the most beautiful romances in recent German cinema. Beer and Rogowski, already electric together in Petzold’s Transit, move through the film with the particular chemistry of two people who inhabit their love story rather than perform it. Their underwater scene — Undine floating free in the reservoir while Christoph welds turbines below — is the film’s most extraordinary image: a water spirit at home, a human working in her element, both of them in the wrong world and the right one simultaneously.
| Director | Christian Petzold |
|---|---|
| Year | 2020 |
| Runtime | 91 minutes |
| Cast | Paula Beer, Franz Rogowski, Maryam Zaree, Jacob Matschenz |
| Awards | Silver Bear Best Actress (Paula Beer), Berlin Film Festival 2020 |
| Streaming | MUBI, AMC+ |
Petzold is one of the most intellectually serious filmmakers working in Germany, and his engagement with the Undine myth is genuinely sophisticated. He read Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1960 essay Undine Leaves — the only retelling of the myth written from Undine’s perspective, in which she addresses all men collectively as “Hans” and begins with “Men! You monsters!” — and named it as his primary inspiration. He named the structural trap explicitly: the myth is not a curse that afflicts men. It is a curse that afflicts Undine. She exists only through men. She cannot have an identity independent of the men who love her and betray her. The cycle of love, betrayal, killing, return, waiting is her sentence, not theirs. Petzold said he wanted to make the first film about this myth that was about Undine’s struggle against this condition rather than the men’s experience of it.
“The most remarkable scene in the film is the lecture Undine gives while Christoph watches. It is the only scene in which she is not defined by her relation to a man — she is a historian, an expert, a mind delivering knowledge. The film frames it as foreplay. Even here, her independence is absorbed into his desire.”
The evidence that something went sideways is in the film’s third act, and it is not in any single scene but in where the camera decides to spend its attention. When Undine kills Johannes in the pool — dragging him under, holding him in a bubble of her element as the original myth requires — it is swift, almost clinical, necessary. The moment belongs to her. But the film immediately cuts to Christoph waking in his hospital bed, calling her name. His recovery is the scene. His search for her in Berlin is the scene. His arrival two years later at the reservoir, diving back down to find her, is the scene. The film follows him. She is the destination of his journey, not the subject of her own.
Bachmann’s Undine says: “I want to have an identity of my own.” In Petzold’s film, Undine gives a lecture on Berlin architecture that is one of the finest scenes he has ever staged — Beer’s voice moving through centuries of demolition and reconstruction with the certainty of someone who witnessed all of it, Christoph in the audience watching not the city models but her face. The lecture is the only extended moment in the film in which Undine exists for herself rather than in relation to a man. She has expertise, continuity, knowledge that exceeds any individual relationship. And then Christoph approaches her, and the lecture becomes the origin of their love story, and what the film does with her independent knowledge is make it the thing that attracted him. Her identity is immediately recruited into his desire. The film does not notice that it has done this.
This blog’s earlier review of Afire identified the structural pattern from outside the film that generated it: “Undine and Nadja perform the same structural function — elemental woman awakens closed man, her loss transforms him.” That observation was made in the context of Petzold’s later film, where the pattern is unconscious, where Nadja is not supernatural but behaves structurally as if she were. In Undine, the pattern is the declared subject. Petzold set out to critique it. The comparison between the two films now reveals something neither could show alone: in Afire, Petzold did not notice that Nadja’s role in the narrative followed Undine’s template. In Undine, he noticed it completely — he named it, theorized it, built the film around breaking it — and still, in the final movement, the camera returned to where it always returns. The man. His haunting. His continuation.
The woman in the water waits. The film finds this beautiful and melancholy and inevitable. Petzold himself said she has to go back and wait for the next man. He said this was a horrible curse. He said the film was about her struggling against it. Watch where the film ends.
She is not struggling. She is waiting. The myth did not release her. The film that set out to break the cycle completed it, more beautifully than any version before it, and called the beauty liberation.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Afire (Christian Petzold, 2023): reviewed on this blog — the film where the Undine structural pattern re-emerges unconsciously, three years later, in a contemporary naturalistic story. Placed beside Undine, the comparison maps what happens when a filmmaker can name the trap and still falls into it.
Phoenix (Christian Petzold, 2014): Petzold’s earlier film about a woman who returns from the dead and must reconstruct herself in relation to the man who may have betrayed her — and in which the final scene finally hands her back her agency. The comparison with Undine asks whether that resolution was possible only because Phoenix had a clearer villain, and Undine a man too innocent to be blamed.
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