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Not gentle medicine: Eisner (Harald Krassnitzer) in the hands of a homeopathic henchman
Photo: Anjeza Cikopano / ORF / ARD
Good and bad are immediately identified in this Viennese "crime scene": In soapy green camouflage clothing, a young woman sneaks through backyards and home gardens in the Hietzing district, while gray-mottled men strut through light-flooded rooms in white linen shirts.
It is easy to see that women are driven by anger and pain, men by craving for recognition and greed.
Logically, for whom our audience heart beats.
Contrasts and conflicts are taken to extremes in this "crime scene": The mysterious woman in green is a fighter of the ELN, a real existing Colombian fighting force with Marxist-Leninist characteristics.
With the men in white about star healers of homeopathy, who whisper about human energetic treatment, but run their company as tough as a capitalist pharmaceutical company.
After a few deaths in the area of the globule traders, the Viennese team around Eisner (Harald Krassnitzer), Fellner (Adele Neuhauser) and Schimpf (Thomas Stipsits) track down the South American and consult.
Schimpf: "What was a guerrilla from Colombia doing in the ultra-conservative Hietzing?"
Fellner: "Hide yourself?"
Eisner: "Exactly. And where is the best place to hide? With the class enemy."
Fatal homeopathy fiasco
The dialogues and the plot are also taken to extremes in this "crime scene".
The South American was once in a relationship with an Austrian who only trusted alternative medicine and let his child die of an illness that could have been easily cured with conventional medicine.
After her daughter's death, the woman went back to the Colombian underground - from which she has now apparently returned to take revenge on those she blames for the homeopathy fiasco.
In the guerrilla fight against the globule bigwigs?
The homeopathic milieu as a shark tank?
The Austrian author and director Rupert Henning stands for bold stories and high-speed dialogues.
In his Viennese "Tatort" episode "Schock", a bitter student threatened to kill his parents live in front of a YouTube audience; in his Munich "Tatort" episode "One Way Ticket", seniors topped up their meager pensions as drug couriers.
Henning knows how to come to a head.
Sometimes you can't see the plot anymore because of all the punch lines.
This is now also the case with the new "Tatort" in Vienna.
The radical actress Sabine Timoteo ("The Free Will"), who has unfortunately far too seldom seen in the cinema or television in recent years, is once again the stunner as a creeping and slamming avenger from the jungle.
And in the dialogues, one gag follows the other, you actually have to laugh a lot.
But is that enough to do justice to the explosive material?
The audience can end up believing they have learned something, but ultimately the topic of alternative medicine remains a little underexposed.
Let's call it the globule effect.
Rating:
6 out of 10 points
"Tatort: Krank",
Sunday, 8.15 p.m., ARD
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