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The investigators in front of satanic floor painting, drawn with human blood: disgusting and efficient
Photo: Hubert Mican / ORF / ARD
The handover from the boomers to the millennials is taking place in all professions at lightning speed: now the hip, sensitive baby faces are even taking the lead in a profession where careworn wrinkled faces used to babble out old Latin verses with thunderous voices – namely that of exorcism.
In this "crime scene" a young priest with a smart quiff was officially appointed by the archdiocese as the highest exorcist of Vienna.
Now he's standing in St. Stephen's Cathedral and says: "I have to find my own way through the darkness." Nothing can stay the way it is;
not even the eternal defensive battle against the Antichrist.
Woker exorcism?
In view of the generation change, a number of questions arise: is there actually such a thing as a woken exorcism?
Can you defeat the devil with a politically correct speech?
And when will the quota in modern exorcism management finally come?
In any case, the predecessor of the hipster clergyman in the "crime scene" was still an old-school Satan-beater.
Video footage shows the old-school priest holding an allegedly possessed young woman tied to the bed while she tries to spit on and attack him.
Now the old man lies dead with broken bones in front of a staircase not far from the diocese, a wound inflicted by a human bite on his arm and an inverted pentagram in his rigid hand.
And Fellner (Bibi Neuhauser) and Eisner (Harald Krassnitzer) are seriously asking themselves: Does the devil have a hand in the game?
A piano like in »Halloween«
In order to at least suggest the possibility of Lucifer's presence, this occult shocker, despite allusions to millennials, only features the well-known basic elements with which the Boomer generation was socialized in a horror manner in the seventies and eighties: the chords drip frostily in the score from the piano like water from icicles, that was first heard in John Carpenter's »Halloween«.
And the woman, apparently haunted by demons, hurls the most vulgar curses in front of the cross held up by the exorcists with a diabolically grunting voice, just as you know them from William Friedkin's »The Exorcist«.
Here these curses are also directed at the caring Inspector Fellner: »You cunt, fuck you!«
Despite the priest update, the image of women has hardly changed since Linda Blair rose to fame as a victim of the devil in »The Exorcist« with fountains of vomit.
Even the - pardon for the boomer wording - satan in the "crime scene" (played by Maresi Riegner) suffers from nausea.
No wonder in her case;
since she believes herself under the spell of the demons, she only eats canned dog food.
The devil is in the gut.
Responsible for this traditional thunderstorm of effects is Thomas Roth, who as one of the in-house directors of the Austrian "crime scene" delivers sometimes very sophisticated and sometimes very simple old-school thrillers.
Compared to other Sunday crime thrillers that deal with satanists and exorcists, Roth's new film is now in the middle: In contrast to the screwed up psychedelic devil worshiper party of the Stuttgart "Tatort" colleagues, the case of the Austrians comes along with its make-believe approach therefore quite confident in his means.
However, unlike the German-Polish "Polizeiruf", where the subject of exorcism was combined with that of the new religious fundamentalism, it does not succeed in somehow turning the material into the present.
As a calculated horror shocker aimed at the abdominal region, where the Sunday roast is possibly being digested, this "crime scene" achieves its effect.
Gross but efficient.
Rating:
6 out of 10 points
"Tatort: The Gate to Hell",
Sunday, 8:15 p.m., The First