A Christian Petzold summer has a particular climate: drily hot enough to parch the grass in the flat German countryside, but with a looming threat of harder, heavier weather, plus a baseline chill inside his characters that ensures they never quite thaw under the beating sun. This signature season has backgrounded Petzold joints from “Jerichow” to “Barbara” to 2023’s excellent “Afire,” and it descends once more, again to simultaneously warming and cooling effect, in “Miroirs No. 3.” A humid little psychological drama of displacement, replacement and fresh plum cake, in which balmy days mix with unhealed trauma to briefly make precarious new lives and identities possible, this 86-minute puzzle piece isn’t one of the director’s major works, but is distinguished by his trademark pleasures of texture and tone — and pushes his ongoing collaboration with star Paula Beer into ever more enigmatic territory.

Far from the bristling emotional potency of...