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Thiel (Axel Prahl) is the devilish clerk who prepares Boerne (Jan Josef Liefers) for the way to purgatory.
Photo: Martin Valentin Menke / WDR
The scenario:
Hell is a liver sausage sandwich.
A devilish revenant of Inspector Thiel (Axel Prahl) sits as a sausage clerk in the forecourt of Hell and receives Professor Boerne (Jan Josef Liefers), who hovers between life and death after a car accident.
While the nightmare Thiel distributes long forms and devours sandwiches, Boerne haunts his colleagues' investigations from the intermediate realm.
A man injected the professor with a substance shortly before he was driving, which made him lose control on the street.
Now the assassin pretends to be a doctor and takes over Boerne's job - and the ghost has no choice but to watch the fraudster try to cover up the attempted murder on him.
The highlight:
Off to purgatory or back to life?
This near-death thriller picks up on motifs from Frank Capra's classic in between empires, "Isn't life beautiful?"
in which James Stewart, a desperate family man after attempting suicide, realizes how sad the lives of his loved ones would have been had it not been for him.
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Thiel wistfully remembers the time with Boerne
Photo: Martin Valentin Menke / WDR
The picture:
My killer and I: While Boerne's comatose body is lying in the intensive care unit, the fraudster who got his job tries to kill him.
Crazy, but good: as if from the perspective of a third party, the victim observes the attempted murder on himself.
The dialogue:
The professor, hovering between life and death, looks at his life with Höllen-Thiel.
Boerne: "I didn't realize how much all this meant to me. The work, Alberich, the life."
Höllen-Thiel: "Supply and demand. The value of life increases the less time we have."
Boerne: "I'm not ready yet. There is still so much to do, to say."
The song:
"American Woman" from Guess Who.
The chest hair blues rock is on when Thiel's hippie father (Claus D. Clausnitzer) passes a flash system in the taxi at a drastically increased speed.
A disaster, because as the vadder says: "I have more points than a Dalmatian."
The review:
8 out of 10 points.
Emo trip with an egomaniac: The Münster slapstick "Tatort" turns into a romantic fantasy thriller.
Nobody really has to switch to the parallel ZDF Herzkino.
The analysis:
Please read on here!
"Tatort: Limbus",
Sunday, 8:15 pm, Das Erste