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Commissioner Moormann (Jasna Fritzi Bauer) with neighbor Schaballa (Aljoscha Stadelmann): The crime scene as hell
Photo: Claudia Konerding / Radio Bremen
A burned out kitchen.
In the next room a dead woman in a bright red wedding dress.
And on the slanted room in scrawled letters the warning: "The devil speaks through walls." The "crime scene" from Bremen begins as a psychological thriller that illuminates the hell of a severely mentally injured person in bright colors and somber music.
The nagging question at the beginning: Who is actually crazy here?
The perpetrator who, fetish-killer-style, put his victim in a meaningful dress, then shot him in the head and then burned half the apartment down?
The murdered woman who had apparently drifted into a parallel world before her death?
Or the commissioner from whose perspective this suspiciously exaggerated horror setting is presented to us?
So much can be revealed: Hell at the scene of the crime is also hell in the subconscious of the investigator in this thriller.
And that's a problem for much of this crime thriller.
During the investigations at the ritually prepared crime scene, Liv Moormann (Jasna Fritzi Bauer) is abruptly thrown back into her own past: the red wedding robe reminds her of a dress she wore as a girl.
And the unwashed, popsicle-eating guy who lives in the apartment below the victim conjures up images of an equally unwashed, ice-cream-sucking childhood neighbor.
Coincidence follows coincidence
Director Anne Zohra Berrached, who became known for her radical pregnancy drama »24 Weeks«, had previously filmed a »crime scene« with Maria Furtwängler - there, too, the inspector threatened to lose herself in the case.
At that time, the parallel conduct of investigative work and investigator psyche came up.
But now one feels a little fooled, because Moormann's rational criminalistic conclusions are pushed forward again and again by her irrational mental cinema.
Flashback follows flashback, coincidence follows coincidence.
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Out of the blue, the policewoman finds a hatch in the floor of the room or a door to a cellar so that she and her colleague Linda Selb (Luise Wolfram) can delve deeper into the mystery of the murder - and in this way also deeper into the mystery of her childhood.
Clearly, the detective who may have been abused or mistreated as a girl must find gates and doors to her memory in order to get to the source of her own injury.
Research thrillers and dream thrillers
The fact that an investigator finds herself in the crime has been an established trick in the thriller genre since »The Silence of the Lambs«, where Hannibal Lecter played with the trauma of his pursuer.
In this "crime scene" based on the screenplay by Martina Mouchot, however, he is used so carelessly extensively that the narrative levels are constantly confused and the naturalistic research crime thriller collides with the trauma thriller.
If delusion and reality are permanently mixed up, the supposedly objective investigation result at the end of the criminal mystery must seem unbelievable.
At first glance, »Love Rage« appears to be consistently conceived: Two women stage two investigators who examine two different female experiences of powerlessness.
The men's silence is also priced into this production because the Danish TV star Dar Salim ("Game of Thrones"), number three of the relatively new Bremen investigative team, had other commitments.
The actors had already self-deprecatingly addressed possible complications in the use of Germany's most important crime series in the mockumentary "How to Tatort".
Due to the absence of Salim and the deliberately distorting female perspective, all male characters in the new episode appear as bizarre, glaringly lit exhibits: Aljoscha Stadelmann gives the neglected neighbor as a mama's boy who is apparently looking for permanent sexual compensation at Eis am Stil.
Matthias Matschke plays the victim's ex-husband as an unfeeling clown who doesn't even show any reactions when the inspector puts a finger of his self-mutilating, dead ex-wife under his nose.
You can't get anything out of the guys in this "crime scene," they're all emotionally dyslexic.
A blatant horror cabinet of male overstrain - through which we would like to have a more reliable guide.
Rating:
5 out of 10 points.
»Tatort: Liebeswut«,
Sunday, 8:15 p.m., Das Erste
