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Fabian Hinrichs as Inspector Voss: Eerie light, limited view, step by step to the truth
Photo: Hendrik Heiden / BR
In how many cellars do we have to descend, wander through how many dark forests and open how many chests and cupboards before the truth is finally revealed to us?
This “crime scene” guides us through dark rooms and deep abysses until it gives us a vague idea of the crime at issue here.
This "crime scene" is an imposition.
And he probably wants to be that too.
He starts out so tenderly.
Inspector Paula Ringelhahn (Dagmar Manzel) is finally in love again, her new lover, Rolf from Bamberg (Sylvester Groth), makes her three different types of eggs for breakfast after the first night at his home out of sheer exuberance.
Longing doesn't rust, that's how happy love goes 50+.
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Hinrichs with colleague Ringelhahn: Longing doesn't rust
Photo: Marc Reimann / BR
But Rolf is suspected of having kidnapped seven-year-old Mike and maybe even murdered him.
Suddenly Ringelhahn's colleague Felix Voss (Fabian Hinrichs) is standing in front of the door and wants to question the colleague's lover.
But Ringelhahn sticks to her new love - but then she can't resist the temptation to go down to the new friend's cellar for a second night.
Paula in the basement
Eerie light, limited view, the inspector gropes her way step by step, experiences the entire range of feelings between relief and horror and has to put her feelings to the test: the lover a murderer? Is love an illusion? Is the world a black hole that soaks up all hope and happiness? The truth is a complicated thing in this thriller: the plot is artfully nested and told from different, sometimes heavily distorted levels of perception. Please don't believe everything you see.
The script for "Where's Mike?" Was written by Thomas Wendrich.
He was previously responsible for the film “The perpetrators - Today is not every day” for the TV trilogy “In the Middle of Germany: NSU”, in which the life and crimes of Beate Zschäpe were told from her point of view.
Wendrichs Franken- »Tatort« was directed by Andreas Kleinert, one of the great stylists of German television films, who always reflects the inner worlds of his characters in idiosyncratic settings.
Most recently, he impressed with the wave rider »crime scene«, which made the desolate Munich seem like a surfer's paradise in the meantime.
Bamberg, the labyrinth
In Kleinert's new Sunday thriller, the tranquil Bamberg of all things turns into a dark narrative labyrinth through which the audience is driven.
The characters it encounters in it are not always reliable in their transmission of truth.
We meet a seventeen-year-old who is apparently suffering from psychotic attacks and locks himself in closets to escape the environment.
Or we watch a film with Inspector Voss through virtual reality glasses that shows from the perspective of a child how a man chases him through the forest - a therapeutic measure for violent criminals, which in this way reflects their destructive behavior as brutally as possible should get.
Virtual reality, perceived reality, segmented reality - in this "crime scene" it is a long, tricky road to truth.
But even if it hurts, the journey is worth it.
Rating:
8 out of 10 points
"Scene of the crime: Where's Mike,"
Sunday 8:15 pm, Das Erste