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Simon Schwarz as Debt Collection Heinzi: Can a Lude be lovable?
Photo: Sara Meister / ARD Degeto / ORF / KGP
As a corpse you do something with the Viennese »crime scene«.
In the new episode, it is the physical shell of a murdered star lawyer that is used for all sorts of postmortem practical jokes.
First, a young cleaner who found the man dead at the desk proudly took a selfie for the Instagram account.
Later, the inspector pulls up the eyelashes of the deceased lawyer and shakes him in order to unlock his mobile phone via the eye scanner.
When that doesn't work, he considers electrifying the corpse to make the dead eyes appear alive.
Seems to be a Viennese thing: elsewhere you can't get the curve fast enough at the sight of death and decay, but in Vienna you fondle the bones of the dead and arrange the lifeless bones into morbid installations.
Nowhere is the bodily remains of murder victims handled as extensively as in the »crime scene« with the investigative duo Eisner and Fellner.
Pure necromancy.
In the new episode, this passion is taken to the extreme right from the start.
A man (Johannes Zeiler) in raging jealousy stabs his wife and her friend with a kitchen knife.
The audience still sees him going into the living room with the knife, but the deed can only be guessed at behind the closed door with frosted glass decoration.
When Eisner (Harald Krassnitzer) and Fellner (Adele Neuhauser) enter the crime scene after some time, the man is sitting in a pool of blood, he has lovingly draped his victim's head on his own lap while he is stroking it.
In the background the law enforcement, in front the bloodstained sinner with a victim, this results in a tableau as if painted in oil.
Visually, this »crime scene« is a stunner.
And what does the corpse selfie have to do with the bloodlust painting?
Now it's getting a little confusing: the lawyer on the corpse selfie kicked the jealous killer out of prison while he was alive, and he made no attempt to deny his guilt.
A little later, the lawyer is found murdered in his office.
Sarcastic tightrope walking
The jealous murderer also comes into question as a lawyer murderer, because he is very religious and actually wanted to pray for the Lord's help while he was in prison.
Honor of sinners, so to speak.
The man didn't like the fact that the star lawyer had kicked him out of the sinner's corner pro bono.
For long stretches, you don't really know where this »crime scene« with its grotesque twists and turns actually wants to go.
But the twists are so pointedly written and staged (book: Karin Lomot and Robert Buchschwenter, director: Gerald Liegel) that you stick with it.
Which is also due to the fact that, with these increasing entanglements, the legendary collection agent Heinzi (Simon Schwarz) from the periphery increasingly takes center stage in the story.
Inkasso-Heinzi is this lovable Chaos Strizzi, who has already appeared in some of Vienna's strongest »crime scenes«.
Here he creates a connection between the incarcerated jealous killer and the star lawyer from prison.
In detention, he then gets caught between the fronts again, but can thus inform Fellner and Eisner about the fronts that are relevant to the case.
Later Fellner tells the touching story of how she met Heinzi during her time at Sitte.
A very dear one is the debt collector Heinzi, despite his profession, from which in 2022 you really shouldn't be able to get anything sentimental anymore.
A pimp as a comic sidekick – such a turn of events only succeeds in the Vienna »crime scene«, which in its better moments comes across as a sarcastic tightrope walk.
Works again this time without major crashes.
Rating:
8 out of 10 points
"Tatort: Everything that is right",
Sunday, 8.15 p.m., the first
