Enlarge image
Batic (Miroslav Nemec, i,), Leitmayr and Nonne: Poison in the night drink?
Photo: Hendrik Heiden / BR
Oh, good old Catholicism.
Wafts of incense, profoundly recited litanies and provocative depictions of Jesus quickly put the delicately-tempered sinner into a state of intoxication.
In this »crime scene« it is Ivo Batic (Miroslav Nemec) who falls into a Roman Catholic feverish dream.
In two sequences of the crime thriller, the detective wanders through the corridors of a monastery, screams echoing from everywhere that could come from pleasure or pain or both. Then he sees a faceless nun who is whipping herself with a leather whip in front of the bleeding Savior. We would rather not analyze here what piety and desire the subconscious mixes up with Batic.
In any case, the trigger for the dream was this obscure herbal tea that the nuns of a monastery served the investigator before going to bed.
Batic and his colleague Leitmayr (Udo Wachtveitl) came to the religious order in the foothills of the Alps because the sisters' auditor was found poisoned in a train that had arrived in Munich.
The victim died of a plant called the spotted hemlock, which also grows in the garden of the monastery, from whose herbs the nuns prepare the tea that sparked Batic's dirty fantasies.
Has someone mixed something poisonous into the night drink for the inspector?
Critically curbed church criticism
Unfortunately, that is the only gripping question in this »crime scene«, which purrs towards its dissolution, a bit undecided between very curbed nunsploitation and badly curbed church criticism.
The script comes from Alex Buresch and Matthias Pacht, who wrote some of the most dazzling Sunday thrillers from the southern region.
For example the longing Munich “crime scene”, which led the investigators into the surfing scene, or the Matthias Brandt “police call” in which the inspector was heavily sedated and connected to a drip to conduct research in a hospital.
That was criticism of the health system in the form of a psychedelic trip.
The monastery thriller lags far behind.
There are a couple of strong, lifeworld scenes from the convent, for example when the sisters, under the direction of the prioress (Corinna Harfouch), initiate an office of the dead. Or when the commissioners slowly discover how the nuns use a few tricks to get the church leadership not to close their convent, which is actually understaffed. The Vatican has already sent a delegation of "scientists" to check whether the Madonna in the monastery is actually crying bloody tears, as the nuns claim, in order to give their community about to be liquidated a bit of positive publicity.
But the production (director: Maris Pfeiffer) is just too good.
Playing with the exploitation of nuns, as we know them from Italian crackers in the style of "The Monastery of 1000 Deadly Sins", is hinted at too innocently, and the self-preservation measures of a religious community, from which the believers run away, could have been portrayed even more evil.
A little more robust action in "1000 deadly sins" style and a little less godly monastery monsters à la "For Heaven's sake" would have done this religious thread quite well.
Rating:
5 out of 10 points
"Tatort: Miracles always happen",
Sunday, 8:15 pm, Das Erste
