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Scene with Martin Brambach (rear) as Commissioner Schnabel: From the Deep State to the New World Order
Photo: Marcus Glahn / MDR
Pizzagate in Dresden?
At the center of this violent "crime scene" is a conspiracy mystic who goes to extremes in his delusion.
A journalist is shot in front of the web camera, a policeman's kneecap is smashed in with a hammer, a dead woman stares out of the freezer with open eyes.
But behind the shock elements of the conventionally built psychopathic thriller emerges the cruelly precise psychogram of a man who militantly defines his involvement in various conspiracy ideologies because in this way he can live out his insult to the world.
In order to emphasize the crime thriller's qualities, we cannot avoid giving some plot hints later in this text, which can be read as spoilers.
But first, an innocuous synopsis: A tabloid journalist is overpowered, drugged, and kidnapped on her way home one night, only to wake up in a dimly lit booth in front of her mouse-masked tormentor.
The mouse mask then issues an ultimatum to the police via the Internet: if they don't clear up 150 unsolved cases of missing children within 24 hours, the kidnapping victim is to be shot.
The kidnapper refers to an alleged conspiracy by politicians and the press, to which all of these missing children are said to have fallen victim.
The model for this assumption is the so-called Pizzagate, the conspiracy plot according to which a gigantic pedophile network is operated from the basement of a restaurant in Washington DC with the participation of Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and Lady Gaga, among others.
But that's just one of many common conspiracy stories that the kidnapper calls up: From the Deep State to the New World Order, the mouse mask has apparently internalized everything that QAnon and lateral thinkers have in their repertoires of madness.
Adolescent as a conspiracy guru
Funny scene in this otherwise not at all funny thriller: The investigators Karin Gorniak (Karin Hanczewski) and Leonie Winkler (Cornelia Gröschel) visit an adolescent who runs one of the most important websites from which conspiracy ideologies are brought to the unstable parts of humanity.
Grinning, the teenager, who has already made a small fortune off his site, sits in his gamer's chair in front of a wall of screens and says, "The best thing about conspiracy theories is their irrefutability."
And - now the possible spoiler - one of the people who got so hopelessly entangled in these so-called theories is a family man whose daughter has been missing for many years.
The investigative plot leads quite quickly to his trail.
In another terrific episode leading role for the »crime scene«, Hans Löw (»Tatort: Let the moon stand in the sky«) cleverly strips away the sick core of the character: Here is a man who, with lack of impulse control and massive narcissism, has only dismantled his own family , only to find the explanation for the self-inflicted social catastrophe in fake news.
The offended man as a militant arm of conspiracy mysticism.
There are some thriller twists and escalations in this film that you have already seen in other Dresden »crime scenes« (book: Stefanie Veith and Jan Cronauer, director: Gregory Kirchhoff).
But in between there are a number of passages that amaze even the experienced thriller audience.
In one scene, under police supervision, the kidnapper meets his daughter, who is still alive.
Full of conviction, he says: "That's not my daughter." Then he looks the young woman in the eye to state coolly: "That's an actress.
A father recognizes his daughter among thousands.«
This motif has never been told so consistently on German television: the conspiracy myth serves as a crutch on which the sociopath drags himself out of the reality he has screwed up.
Rating:
8 out of 10 points
"Crime scene: cat and mouse",
Sunday, 8.15 p.m., the first