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Actress Alexandra Maria Lara in "8 witnesses": heroine with a fragile mental balance
Photo: Episode 6: Ruth Meller / Hardy Brackmann / TVNOW
Whenever she thinks that nothing works anymore, the police bring in external psycho-freaks.
The series "8 witnesses" about the kidnapping of a ten-year-old girl in Berlin follows this well-hung crime story principle.
The heroine of the eight-part is apparently a very respected legal psychologist and memory researcher named Jasmin Braun.
The woman is ordered by Soko director Dietz (Ralph Herforth) to the scene of the kidnapping of little Emma, in the natural history museum - and played by actress Alexandra Maria Lara with a fluttering trench coat and horn-rimmed glasses.
The job of Dr.
It is brown to question eight witnesses.
Most of them could have made observations in the hustle and bustle of the explosion that apparently occurred in broad daylight in the museum shortly before Emma's kidnapping.
Other witnesses might otherwise be useful.
The psychologist pretends to be a strict scientist and says: "An iron principle in memory research is that every personal questionnaire falsifies the result."
Exciting and intelligently structured
The work »8 Zeugen«, which has now started on TVNow, consists of eight 20-minute episodes in which the actress Lara is a nerd woman - and therefore often says very high-pitched sentences.
In each episode she hears a witness.
The interrogation room is the museum's library.
The heroine leaves this place every now and then to consult with the super nervous police officer Dietz or his pleasantly sober assistant Schröder (Céci Chuh) in the next room.
Sometimes Dr.
Braun also went to the bathroom to calm her own tense mind.
The psychologist herself has, one can say without the risk of spoilers, an extremely sensitive, fragile mental balance.
She may be a professional human memory specialist with an international reputation;
privately, therefore, she is by no means the master of her own memories.
The series "8 witnesses" is presented as involuntarily funny trash television.
In the opening credits you can see the actress Lara trudging through absurdly artificial black clouds of bomb smoke, the trailer is also loud, lurid nonsense.
It's a bit of a shame.
On the one hand, because the eight-part series by director Jörg Lühdorff, in which it quickly becomes apparent that the kidnapped Emma is the daughter of the Berlin Senator for the Interior, is exciting and intelligently structured.
On the other hand, because the series processes interesting scientific findings about the manipulability of memory.
For example, about the phenomenon that people often remember blatantly wrong and are difficult to convince of this fact - according to the motto: I remember something that unfortunately never happened.
Even wild love stories can sometimes be completely made up and still make those who invented them almost happy, as you can find out here.
Nor is a bomb always a weapon of destruction.
In the series action, it apparently only served the kidnappers to distract the museum visitors;
So how Ms. Lara alias Dr.
Braun proclaims "to overlay her memories".
Every now and then you can see a digital clock light up in this kidnapping drama, which is a fight against time - every criminalist and every crime reader knows that the chances of a kidnapping victim's chances of survival rapidly decline after the first few hours.
You can see downpours and lightning flashes in front of the museum.
And you watch how surprising news is read on computer screens.
The rather static style of play of the increasingly physically challenged interrogator Braun often gives her interlocutors a nice performance space.
The great actress Ursula Werner turns out to be the greatest among the witness actors.
In "8 Zeugen" she plays a guest house hostess from Sassnitz on the island of Rügen who has come to visit Berlin and the museum and who defiantly defies the intrusiveness of modern psychological investigations.
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Actress Chuh, colleague Herforth as an investigator duo in "8 Witnesses": Male bundle of nerves with a pleasantly sober assistant
Photo: Episode 1: Carla Perera / Hardy Brackmann / TVNOW
The motif of the bomb explosion in the museum in this series, for which the director Lühdorff also wrote the screenplay together with Janosch Kosack, could remind literature and cinema enthusiasts of the bomb exploding in a New York museum in the bestselling novel »The Distelfink« by the US writer Donna, which was also filmed Tartt remember. "It will end in a catastrophe," promises Alexandra Maria Lara's heroine at the beginning of "8 Witnesses". The hero in Tartt's novel, a boy named Theo Decker, had already announced: “Nobody will ever, ever be able to convince me that life is a fantastic, rewarding gift. Because this is the truth: life is a catastrophe. ”In both cases, the heroic figures with cognizance are right.