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Commissioner Eyckhoff (Verena Altenberger, l.) And colleague Eden (Stefan Zinner) on the ice rink: access is prohibited for people over 18 years of age
Photo: Hendrik Heiden / Hendrik Heiden / BR
Someone please tell us why you want to be a detective.
Dealing with criminals day and night can't be right.
At least that's what the schoolgirl thinks, who arrives at the police department at the beginning of the "police call" for the information day to harass Bessie Eyckhoff (Verena Altenberger).
Eyckhoff replies that in her job, one is often closer to the victims than to the perpetrators, and that it is all about the most complex relationships that people have with one another.
Unsatisfactory answer.
But what follows is this highly condensed, extremely fluid »police call« that makes it very clear what fascinates Eyckhoff about her work.
After the murder of a 16-year-old girl, we follow the inspector with a handful of teenagers who we can hardly tell apart at first with their fairly similar bleached haircuts and pierced noses.
We watch them roller skate, ice skate or skateboard;
how they take drugs or sell drugs.
No idea who has what going on with whom, and even less do you suspect or know who could be the victim and who the perpetrator.
It doesn't really matter at first because there is so much to see and hear.
Listening is particularly important: where it has become standard in other Sunday thrillers to pour a tasteful, melancholic pop song over the sad ending at the end to relieve the audience of thinking and feeling, the most beautiful and horrible tracks can be heard here match the characters and their environment.
Billie Eilish's inevitable "Bad Guy" roars out of the speakers while pirouettes on the ice rink, Migos' trap cracker "Deadz" while smoking weed in the youth club, that sort of thing.
In the teen biotope
On one occasion, however, we also hear and see an adult woman who is drunk dancing in the kitchen under her headphones to Rita Ora's radio hit »Let You Love Me«.
It's her daughter's birthday and the piece of music is apparently her favorite song.
The daughter has been missing for two years;
now her mother (Anna Grisebach) strays back and forth between ice rink, skater hangout and beer tank.
She may be hoping to find clues among the kids about what might have happened to her daughter.
Eyckhoff also follows her through the confusing territory of the young wild ones.
Does the current murder have anything to do with the old missing persons case?
This "police call" is a long, lurching search motion for the first two thirds.
That has to be the case, because the plot leads into a very unique teen topography, which you as an adult can't quite grasp, even with recourse to your own adolescence.
The young people built it up themselves, access was forbidden for people over 18 years of age.
The director was the Greek filmmaker Filippos Tsitos, who had already illuminated dim corners of Munich and Hamburg for the »crime scene« in the noughties, feeling amazed and groping.
Tsitos and the authors Sebastian Brauneis and Roderick Warich do not pretend to understand exactly what young people are doing in their world.
Altenberger also remains a spectator;
she doesn't get the details of the complex relationships she invokes at first.
Foreign bodies in the puberty cosmos
So it remains complicated with the Munich "police call": Verena Altenberger has the toughest job in the country of Sunday crime with her role as Bessie Eyckhoff.
The entire setting is constantly changing;
sometimes the station is dismantled by an explosive plot, sometimes the investigator rises in the official hierarchy, the BR editorial team has not been interested in continuity so far.
Eyckhoff has now ended up with the homicide squad from patrol service, after all she meets again the very Bavarian colleague Eden (Stephan Zinner) from the episode that played in Munich-Sendling.
He's more tomboyish, but is good as a solid sidekick - this combination also promises a complex relationship that Eyckhoff appreciates.
Other actresses would reach their limits in such a permanently confusing situation - but Altenberger always manages to capitalize on her character.
After cutting off her hair for her role as a paramour in »Jedermann« at the Salzburg Festival last summer under the astonishingly intrusive will of the press to comment, she now wears a razor cut for the »Polizeiruf«, which was filmed afterwards, like those of the young people characters resembles.
Nevertheless, Altenberger's Eyckhoff remains in a good way a foreign body in the cosmos of puberty, through which she strolls with interest and empathy, without believing that she can get along with the kids.
The class of this thriller is also shown by the way in which, after the tentative approach to the teenagers, action and attitude come to a head in the last meters - and the inspector clearly positions herself on the question of who is the victim and who is the perpetrator.
Let's put it this way: Even the exceptional state of adolescence does not legitimize being a complete asshole.
"Police call 110: The light that the dead see",
Sunday, 8:15 p.m., Das Erste
