Legend goes that the undine, an elemental race of water nymphs described in ancient European myths, are doomed to the fidelity of their beloved. Emerging from the water to love a man of their choosing and thereby become human, undine are beautiful but fragile creatures, cursed to die if their man isn’t faithful to them. The price of that infidelity? Death. Whereas many relationships end in taters when a beau is unfaithful, it’s literally kill or be killed for the undine and that goes doubly so in acclaimed German director Christian Petzold’s mythologically-rooted romantic drama Undine. 

In essence a grounded ‘little mermaid’ tale with more cheating and death, Undine introduces us to its titular character Undine (Paula Beer) as her romantic relationship with Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) has reached its natural conclusion. He’s breaking up with her over coffee, citing his affection for another woman. But he knows the rules and the mild-mannered but deeply wounded Undine reminds Johannes that his leaving means she will be forced to kill him. She pleads with him to wait at the cafe across the street while she gives a quick lecture about Berlin’s architectural history at the Berlin City Museum where she works as an art historian. 

Johannes doesn’t take the threat literally, absconding before Undine returns to hash out the details of their hostage romance. Undine barely has time to register the betrayal before the diver Christoph (Franz Rogowski) enters the equation. Having just seen her lecture, Christoph wants to buy Undine coffee and maybe take her on a date. In one of the films more intuitively romantic sequences, an ill-timed stumble leads to an exploding fish tank. The two characters knocked back and awash in water and glass leads to a moment of quiet connection that gives Undine the opportunity to fall quickly in love anew.

Petzold, working from a somewhat limp script that he also wrote, tries to fill the fringes of Undine with nods to the characters mythic roots but he miscalculates what is interesting about this story, delivering a tepid romance and only thin slices of mythological bait that leaves us questioning what is behind the curtain yet never all that intrigued. The audience feels tasked with the homework of digging into the mythology themselves, something the film has a relatively poor grasp on, Petzold’s remixing of the myth failing because he has not laid enough narrative foundation to experiment atop of. 

Where Undine should swelter, it flounders; where it should luxuriate, it thrashes. Tipping the scales of 90 minutes, the whole thing feels too slight, the slim scope of Petzold’s romantic vision failing to cast the kind of entrancing spell that supercharges a good romance. There’s plenty of red herrings that suggest the movie will go to more mystical places, namely a gigantic 6-foot catfish known as Big Gunther, but as Undine painstakingly unpacks its story, this viewer realized there isn’t much thematic meat swimming beyond the shallows and what you see is what you get.

The doe-eyed Beer is a well-cast anchor for the film though her character arc and overall opacity left this viewer cold. Her romance shared with Christoph rides on an unspoken burning desire that’s only partially successful (Rogowski and Beer have decent chemistry but it’s hardly electrifying) but the textual elements of their relationship fails to justify the whole of the film riding on their entanglement and the sacrifices that come later. A sense of longing punctuates their intimacy but it feels always at arm length away, or underwater. And though we’ve been clued into romance leading to death since the opening scene, Undine cannot capitalize on the lingering dread of what happens once a relationship sours.

CONCLUSION: This economical German fantasy-romance pales in the shadow of more successful genre combinations, relying on muggy romance and hazy mythology to charge an otherwise straight and narrow tale of love at first sight.

C

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