In the Easter Monday crime thriller “Crime Scene: Fear in the Dark” (April 1, 8:15 p.m., Das Erste), the Bremen investigative team Liv Moormann (Jasna Fritzi Bauer, 35) and Linda Selb (Luise Wolfram, 36) have to deal with a fatal crime Outdoor experiment by a group of helicopter moms. Inspector Selb is involuntarily confronted with her own childhood.
The three neighbors Ayla Ömer (Pegah Ferydoni, 40), Viola Klemm (Sophie Lutz, 42) and Marlene Seifert (Inez Bjørg David, 42) from the middle-class Bremen residential area of Schwachhausen have decided to give their pampered teenage children a rest before they finally enter adulthood to give a lesson in independence and team building. The three are to be subjected to “dropping”, a supposed parenting trend from Holland in which young people are left in the wilderness equipped with only a map, a compass and some camping supplies and then have to find their way home alone. As die-hard helicopter moms, they obviously can’t send their offspring into the forest uncontrollably and therefore think it’s a good idea to play through the planned survival trip themselves beforehand to be on the safe side.
Blindfolded, the kids transport them to Bremen Switzerland, a boggy forest area on the outskirts of Bremen, and leave them there to their experimental fate. In order to get the crime plot going, of course everything that could go wrong on this trip goes wrong. Not only do the three townspeople not find any geographical orientation right from the start, but after a short time they become entangled in arguments that soon revolve not only around existing disputes, but also around the problem of running out of drinking water after drinking the champagne they had brought with them is. Around 36 hours later, one of the three women, the dominant monument protection department head Marlene Seifert, is no longer among the living.
In order to clarify the background to her death, the summoned inspectors Moormann and Selb go from the boggy site where the body was found to the upscale Bremen residential area of Schwachhausen in order to take a closer look at the family members of the three disaster campers who reside there. During the closely sequenced interrogations of the husbands and children, numerous oddities and inconsistencies soon come to light, which only gradually become clear as the story progresses. Nobody involved seems to be really sad about the tragic loss of their wife, friend and neighbor.
Further insights into the scheming structure of the wealthy neighborhood are provided by Inspector Linda Selb’s aunt, Johanna Selb (Claudia Geisler-Bading, 58), who happens to live on the same street and has excellent gossip skills. As it turns out, Inspector Selb spent a year of her childhood with this aunt for unknown family reasons and doesn’t have particularly fond memories of her time in the Schwachhausen Art Nouveau sociotope.
While almost all of the children and husbands interrogated soon become suspects, the investigation expands in a further direction. The mysterious “cell phone man”, who years ago secretly photographed forest campers sleeping and presumably killed one of them, may have struck again…
Well… For viewers who didn’t make it for a spring-like walk in the woods on Easter Monday, this crime scene offers a nice opportunity to catch up, at least visually. However, you shouldn’t expect a really gripping outdoor thriller that exploits the narrative possibilities inherent in the interesting basic plot and creates a bit of Hansel and Gretel horror.
The original constellation of characters and ambitious narrative structure (the tragic events in the forest are woven into the investigative thread in several flashbacks as a countdown to Marlene Seifert’s death) get all too tangled up in the thicket of bloodless and impressively poorly staged interrogation situations. The director Leah Striker (50), a renowned camerawoman who made her directing debut with this crime scene, unfortunately does not succeed in staging the various characters and their social upheavals with one another with psychological depth.
The actors involved are not to blame for the lack of character direction and the wooden dialogues developed by screenwriter Kirsten Peters. Even a hundred-carat character, like Henning Baum (51), known from “The Last Bull,” who subsequently embodies the husband of the woman who died in the forest, gets hopelessly stuck in the narrative morass with his talent. At least the dialogue-free natural impressions from Bremen Switzerland, with which the cameraman Stefan Unterberger (50) enriches the picture level, provide a little distraction from this dramaturgical tragedy, which was destined to become a frightening thriller fairy tale. At least in this respect, lost holiday TV viewers get their money’s worth with “Tatort: Fear in the Dark” in the end.
