Undine Wibeau (Paula Beer) has just received some bad news: her boyfriend Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) has announced he has fallen in love with someone else and he will be splitting up with Undine. She is stunned, too stunned to even cry, and after some weak attempts to deny what is happening, she has to go back to work. She has a job as a tour guide, delivering the same speech every day to tourists who want to see the huge models of the Berlin cityscape they are situated in, though when she notices the part of the model where she was dumped, she must pause for a few seconds to compose herself. If only there was someone else...
And if only Undine were not a... mermaid? Some kind of water nymph? Even a siren? Writer and director Christian Petzold had based his story on an item of myth, a fairy tale if you like, about a supernatural woman who had to fall in love with a mortal man to gain her soul, but if he ever left her, there would be Hell to pay - for him. This essential unknowability of the denizens of other, unearthly realms was what Petzold capitalised on, for while from some scenes Undine comes across as a perfectly charming young lady, from other scenes there is a more otherworldly aspect to her that could easily turn sinister if you crossed her, which Johannes has just done.
But she doesn't do something about that right away, as almost immediately after the breakup she meets someone else, a puppyish industrial diver named Christoph (Franz Ragowski, who starred with Beer in a previous Petzold film, Transit). In a weird turn of events, as he introduces himself to her just as she notices something odd going on with the restaurant fish tank: it then shatters and sends them both crashing to the floor. In this movie's world, that's your meet cute, folks, and before you know it the couple have bonded over this, and it seems Undine can put her ex behind her. But this split has obviously left her with more baggage than she or Christoph know how to handle.
Not least because the story throws in scenes like the one where Undine goes diving with her boyfriend, he sees her swimming with the body of water's resident massive catfish, and then has to rescue her when she is parted from her diving equipment. Topping that is the emergency treatment he gives her to revive to consciousness really turns her on, which he is either too relieved or too naïve to register with, but for the audience there is that nagging feeling that something in this woman's background, her makeup, is off-kilter and destined to send her - and Christoph - onto very strange journeys before the end credits roll. Though of course, if you are aware of the story of Ondine, then maybe you won't be quite as surprised at the outcome.
Whether you will go with the course this takes, recognising the fable or otherwise, is very much dependent on your tolerance for this sort of magical realism, not a horror movie, not a sci-fi flick like The Shape of Water, but with a definite fantastical element in that style, though nobody climbs into a fishman outfit to perform. Beer and Ragowski made a highly engaging couple, you genuinely believed in their love as everything around them grew increasingly farfetched, and Beer in particular was very strong as an attractive character who we think we understand one minute, then comes across as utterly inscrutable the next. The sense that fairy tales have to be repeated to endure, like Undine's tour guide lectures, was echoed in repetitions around the narrative, tying in with a theme about Berlin's reinvention, and after a while we begin to worry not so much for her but for Christoph, who may be in over his head, to use a watery analogy. It was those central performances that kept you engaged, despite the impassive nature of the meaning.
