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"Tatort" scene with Karin Hanczewski, Martin Brambach and a corpse actress: Depression is rampant, the murderous lust is sprouting.
Photo: Hardy Spitz / MDR
The gardener waters the flower bed with the water hose, while the fun rapper Ali As rejoices from the jukebox: »I get spring fever when the flowers bloom again.
Purple, yellow, green!
Purple, yellow, green!«
However, the people in this »crime scene«, which mainly takes place in a company for landscape maintenance, don't feel spring fever.
People lie frozen in the discounts.
They're floating dead in the cold, black Elbe.
Or you can find her tied to a chair with a deep hole in her head.
Hate flourishes, depression ramps up, murderous lust sprout.
The first victim is the mother of the family nursery, who is found with her skull crushed in among freshly sown flowers.
A mentally handicapped employee who was seen fleeing the scene with blood on his hands is suspected.
But on further examination, the Dresden team of investigators (Karin Hanczewski, Cornelia Gröschel, Martin Brambach) uncovered the usual conflict arrangements of lower-middle-class organized life contexts: the son-in-law obviously had problems with the mother-in-law, the daughter tended to depression due to the overwork, and was already in general inheritance cleared?
"The Other Twin"
The great thing about this »crime scene« (book: Kristin Derfler, director: Andreas Herzog) is how those responsible make us believe that they are taking us to one of these conventional tours of the world of work and life, while they are already lustily oiling the hinges of the trapdoors, which let the audience flop into a cruel psychological thriller in the last third.
So first of all, the inspectors painstakingly collect all the facts about their job and relationship status, account balance and industry problems - before the story suddenly turns into a psychopathological horror show similar to the fast-paced Freudian thrillers by François Ozon ("The Other Twin").
The view narrows more and more to the daughter of the farm, who first bends depressed over the barren beds, only to later, when she has apparently blossomed again in love with her husband, play tender etudes with him on the piano.
The actress Kristin Suckow (known from the title role in »Ottilie von Faber-Castell – Eine brave Frau«) plays the woman with pleasure in ambiguity without shouting out the mysteriousness of her character.
We can't reveal more about the content of the thriller at this point if we don't want to spoil it roughly.
However, we can still praise the charming impressions with which the whole disaster of this family tragedy is announced: The story is repeatedly shown, for example, from the perspective of citrus fruits growing in the greenhouse over which spiders are crawling.
The tempo is throttled over the first two thirds, the tone relatively laconic.
In return, those responsible treat themselves to a visually stunning, melodramatic finale including an enjoyable power ballad.
The reticent acting main actress really deserves that.
Rating:
8 out of 10 points
"Tatort: Dead Heart",
Sunday, 8:15 p.m., The First