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Undine begins at an ending. The titular character, played with ferocious vulnerability by Paula Beer, tells the man sitting across from her that if he leaves her, she must kill him. The café setting situates them in modern Berlin, but the content of their conversation is the stuff of myth, passed down through the centuries from Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué to Hans Christian Andersen and a proliferation of iterations since. Now, writer-director Christian Petzold offers his own take on the mermaid tale. Coming off the conclusion of his “Love in the Times of Oppressive Systems” trilogy — comprising Barbara (2012), Phoenix (2014), and Transit (2018) — Petzold is embarking on a new trilogy of films inspired by German myths. Undine is the first in the series, but, as with all things Petzold, beginnings and endings are less than clear. Undine reunites the electrifying duo of Beer and Franz Rogowski, whose desperate chemistry first animated the labyrinthine Transit. Like Barbara and Phoenix before it, Undine also concerns the disjointed history of Berlin as a city ravaged by war and divided by occupation, home to shifting seats of power and multitudinous identities over time. Perhaps only myth can repair the shambles of its past. ~Travis Weedon