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Locked rooms, repressed trauma: Commissioner Brasch (Claudia Michelsen) with the daughter of the drug addict murder victim
Photo: Stefan Erhard / MDR
A room like a museum.
It is the teenage room of a dead young woman, her parents kept it locked for years.
A teddy bear on the bed, photos from happy days on the wall.
The superintendent sniffs around the girls' clothes, the father looks through the crack in the door into the realm of the dead.
Then the old man utters these cruel words that sound as if he were looking for absolution from the policewoman: "When I found out about her death, I was relieved: Now it's over! Is it okay to think that about your own child?"
This "police call" is a psychological thriller that penetrates closed rooms in its good moments without much bohei and plunges into repressed family trauma.
Hurts.
A young woman was killed with a close-up shot in the back of the head on a country road near Magdeburg.
A mafia-style execution.
The absurd: the young woman - the very one whose room the inspector ransacked - was declared dead years ago.
As it quickly turns out, her demise was only fictitious so that she could go into a witness protection program with a new identity.
At that time she had testified against a drug lord that when she was shot, his henchmen could have had a hand in it.
Commissioner Doreen Brasch (Claudia Michelsen) researches Magdeburg's drug scene.
She meets dealers who meanwhile sell heroin on the Darknet.
She meets Fixer looking for the next shot.
She meets a gang boss who is in jail.
And she meets a gangster woman who, behind the facade of a real estate company, apparently continues the business of the booked husband.
Magdeburg is not Tijuana
The Mafia bride is played by Deborah Kaufmann, the hotel manager Tiedemann from the Netflix series "Dark".
The figure is a bit reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh's drug panorama "Traffic - the power of the cartel", where Catherine Zeta-Jones as the gangster wife suddenly takes the business of the arrested man into her hand and between northern Mexico and the southern USA keeps going.
Now Magdeburg is not Tijuana, but director and author David Nawrath and his co-authors Michael Ganthenberg and Paul Salisbury manage quite well to spread the drug plot against the rather less interesting background of the Saxony-Anhalt province.
Magdeburg, as we see it in this "police call", seems to be built in part on heroin.
He is not even trying to copy US thriller flair via chases or exchanges of fire.
Once a fugitive runs across a field, that has to be enough for action.
The filmmakers move the emotional center of the story to the farm, where investigator Brasch delivers the murdered woman's three-year-old daughter so that she can grow up with her grandfather.
Many of the ideas in "Death of a Dead" don't quite work out;
one notices that the Magdeburg “police call” is still struggling to find a suitable formula to make Brasch's solo actions plausible after his numerous investigators and sidekicks departures.
But how in this episode the drama of parents who have become estranged from their children gradually opens up under the drug plot, it stirs up.
Rating:
6 out of 10 points
"Police call: death of a dead",
Sunday, 8:15 pm, ARD
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