General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Undine (2020 film)

Undine is a 2020 German-French drama film directed and written by Christian Petzold, in which a Berlin historian named Undine (Paula Beer) lives under the terms of the old water-spirit myth: if the man she loves betrays her, she must kill him and return to the water she once came from.¹ The film premiered in the main competition of the 70th Berlin International Film Festival on 23 February 2020 and was released in German cinemas on 2 July 2020.²

Key fact	Detail
Director and screenplay	Christian Petzold¹
Cast	Paula Beer (Undine), Franz Rogowski (Christoph), Maryam Zaree (Monika), Jacob Matschenz (Johannes)³
Production	Schramm Film Koerner & Weber, co-produced with Les Films du Losange; 90 minutes, German language¹
Budget and shooting	3.86 million euros; filmed 25 June to 15 August 2019 in Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia⁴
Release	World premiere 23 February 2020, Berlinale competition; German theatrical release 2 July 2020 (Piffl Medien)²
Major awards	Silver Bear for Best Actress (Paula Beer) and FIPRESCI Prize, Berlin 2020; European Film Award for Best Actress⁵^•²
Reception	89% on Rotten Tomatoes (126 fresh of 142 reviews); 6.6 on IMDb⁶

Spoilers

Plot and the myth

Undine works in Berlin as a historian and museum guide lecturing on the city's urban development; she has a small apartment at Alexanderplatz, a master's degree in history, and a freelance contract.¹ Beneath this modern life lies the old myth of the water spirit who gains a human soul through a man's love: if her lover betrays her, she must kill him and return to the water.¹

The story opens with a breakup at a café: her lover Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) tells her he has met someone else, and Undine tells him, "If you leave, I'll have to kill you."⁷ When she returns from her job across the street, he has vanished, and in the moment of betrayal she meets Christoph (Franz Rogowski), an industrial diver, when a nearby aquarium shatters over them both.⁷ A new, happy love follows, but when Christoph begins to feel that Undine is running away from something, she has to face her curse.¹ The film is largely aquatic, repeatedly descending into the murky green world of a reservoir on the Wupper river, among bridgeheads, turbines, and water plants.⁸

Undine's lectures on Berlin's history carry the film's other theme: a city built on swamps, bisected by a wall for nearly a third of the last century, where the old and the new have blended.⁷ Critics read the film as mixing myth and present-day realism; the Deutsche Filmbewertung jury described how Petzold and cinematographer Hans Fromm subtly blend perception and imagination, myth and reality.⁹

Origins and production

Petzold knew the Undine myth, which German Romanticism spread in countless variations in the 19th century, from childhood, but two texts drew him to the material: Peter von Matt's nonfiction book Liebesverrat and Ingeborg Bachmann's story "Undine geht". He has summarized Bachmann's curse as the idea that men are never faithful because, at bottom, they love only themselves. The first screenplay sketch was written in a Marseille hotel room during the shoot of his previous film Transit (2018), which also starred Beer and Rogowski.¹⁰

Production details. The film was produced by Schramm Film Koerner & Weber with Margaret Ménégoz of Les Films du Losange as co-producer, in cooperation with ZDF, Arte, and Arte France Cinéma.¹¹ The budget was 3.86 million euros, with funding from BKM (500,000 euros), Film- und Medienstiftung NRW (180,000 euros), and other German and French funders.⁴ Shooting ran from 25 June to 15 August 2019 in Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia, with studio work at Filmstudio Babelsberg; Berlin locations included the Märkisches Museum, which serves as Undine's workplace, and the Hauptbahnhof.⁴^•¹² It was Petzold's first film made with digital technology.¹⁰ The credited music is by J.S. Bach.¹³

Petzold has described Undine as the first part of a planned trilogy about mythological figures.¹⁴

Release

The film premiered on 23 February 2020 in the competition of the Berlin International Film Festival and reached German cinemas on 2 July 2020, distributed by Piffl Medien, with an FSK 12 rating.²^•¹¹ It was released on DVD and Blu-ray and on video-on-demand platforms in Germany and later became available on streaming services in the United States, including MUBI and Sundance Now.¹¹^•¹⁵

Awards

At the 2020 Berlinale, Paula Beer won the Silver Bear for Best Actress and the film won the FIPRESCI Prize of the international critics' jury in the competition section; it was also nominated for the Golden Bear for Best Film.⁵^•¹⁶ In December 2020 Beer won the European Film Award for Best Actress, one of two European Film Awards for German films that year.²^•¹⁷ The film was nominated for the German Film Award in Gold for Outstanding Feature Film and for Best Sound.⁵ Other honors include Best Director (Petzold) and Best Editing (Bettina Böhler) at the Seville European Film Festival, a Jury Special Prize for Artistic Contribution for Franz Rogowski at the Lisbon Film Festival, and a Special Jury Prize for Acting for Beer at the Montclair Film Festival.⁵ The German rating board FBW awarded the film its Prädikat "besonders wertvoll" (especially valuable).⁹

Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 89 percent, with 126 of 142 reviews positive; IMDb users rate it 6.6.⁶ Reviewers highlighted the central pairing: The Hollywood Reporter found Beer and Rogowski so convincing together that it was hard not to root for them, and Screen Daily described a lean, crisply shot tale that shifts between romance, suspense, and sudden humor.¹⁸ Stephanie Zacharek, writing in Time, placed the film in Petzold's line of work on longing, obsession, and deceit, alongside Barbara (2012) and Phoenix (2014), and noted that Beer and Rogowski had also starred together in his Transit (2018).⁷ J. Hoberman, writing in The New York Review of Books, described a film that plunges decisively into the supernatural, with accidents, acts of vengeance, vanishings, and intimations of Wuthering Heights.¹³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026