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Ballauf (Klaus J. Behrendt) and Schenk (Dietmar Bär) with a suspect: Does this man hear cigarettes after sex?
Photo: Martin Valentin Menke / WDR
Almost as long as the sound film has been around, the sex offender's sick lust comes with a gentle melody.
As early as 1931 in "M - Eine Stadt sucht ein Mörder", the mother of all serial killer thrillers, Peter Lorre, as a child murderer, whistled the melody from Grieg's "Peer Gynt" before stalking his victims.
Since then: the sweeter the song, the more monstrous the murder.
In the new Cologne “Tatort”, the apparently mentally disturbed perpetrator is assigned the signature song “Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby”, an indie hit by the Texan band Cigarettes After Sex from 2012. The whispered appeasement of the headline that the addressed No pain inflicted on the person is, of course, a lie. While the perpetrator lets the ballad run through headphones at the beginning of the thriller, he stabs his female victim obsessively.
Schenk (Dietmar Bär) and Ballauf (Klaus J. Behrendt) learn from the coroner at the scene of the crime that the person is said to have stabbed twelve times.
The victim was a nurse who had recently married a recently released thug.
During their investigations, the two investigators are confronted with the phenomenon of hybristophilia, which refers to people who develop romantic feelings for violent criminals and sex criminals.
Greetings from Manson
This is not a new phenomenon and yet it has not yet been widely explored. In the course of the thriller it was once said: "Charles Manson had laundry baskets full of love letters in his cell." Fun fact: Manson, convicted of seven murders, was also a fan of romantic folk pop, as can be heard in his performance "Invisible Tears". Musically, the murderer in the »Tatort« and Manson are obviously on the same wavelength.
While Schenk and Ballauf chase after the headphone killer, a second narrative thread is opened: A single mother who is also addicted to hybristophilia brings a criminal who has been released from prison into her apartment.
He turtles with the mother and bullies the little son.
In one scene, the ex-prisoner hits the child in the pit of the stomach, gets a beer from the refrigerator and says calmly to the boy writhing on the floor: "Woe, you're crying!"
This is of course a hammer set for a crime thriller in which the cruelest deeds are committed to the most tearful music.
Author Arne Nolting and director Jan Martin Scharf narrate their psychological thriller over long stretches pointedly, sometimes boldly and occasionally with a bit of effect.
The big plus of this »crime scene« is also its small drawback: Nolting and Scharf work with a clever time structure, which is not entirely plausible due to the signature song dated 2012, which runs through the plot as a plot element is.
That may seem like the pedantry of the pop aficionado - but anyone who relies so heavily on a single piece of music has to play it off with all the consequences for the story.
Rating:
7 out of 10 points
"Tatort: The Charm of Evil",
Sunday, 8:15 pm, Das Erste