The new dual leadership in Rostock’s “Police Call 110” police station, Katrin König (Anneke Kim Sarnau, 50) and Melly Böwe (Lina Beckmann, 41), and their team have to solve the death of a young woman. A young man (Jonathan Perleth, born 1994) is wrongly suspected. The police are looking for him, without suspecting that the trans man has not yet come out and is also terrified of it…
Elementary school teacher Nathalie Gerber (Lea Freund, 26) is found dead in the parking lot of the Knockout pub. There she had an appointment with her online date Daniel A. (Perleth). He is now being searched for. But Daniel cannot report to the police because he is a trans man who has not yet come out and whose greatest fear is that his father Frank Adamek (Jörg Witte, 58) will find out about it in this way. Katrin König and Melly Böwe only have the latest information from Nathalie’s dating app: they are looking for a man who sang in a Rostock choir.
Despite the cake rolls, Böwe’s debut in the infirmary is not comfortable, because there are also points of friction around gender images at the police station. How is life for Röder (Uwe Preuss, born 1961), Thiesler (Josef Heynert, 46) and Pöschel (Andreas Guenther, 49) with two women at the top? And how do the two women deal with each other – Thiesler predicts a catfight.
Meanwhile, Daniel is struggling with his bad conscience, for his self-determined coming out and for his great love Hanna Blankenstein (Alina Stiegler, 29). When he meets Marc Wigand (Max Krause, born 1993), Nathalie’s childhood friend and later stalker, Daniel believes he has been released from his dilemma: he can present the perpetrator and protect his own identity. But then he’s wrong…
In any case. The viewers know from the start who it was and, above all, that Daniel had nothing to do with it, and so there is plenty of well-used and impressively staged space to tell about the young transman’s predicament. “Despite a strong detective thriller, Daniel is our main character,” confirms director Dustin Loose (36). “We tell stories around him and accompany him into many situations. But the story we tell is so universal and close that in the end it no longer matters who identifies as what and what you call it. Because Ultimately, we’re telling about a person struggling with and for themselves,” he summarizes.
Jonathan Perleth plays the lovable and desperate Daniel, whose passport still says Daniela, incredibly well and believably. And that despite the fact that he was still an acting student at the casting. Maybe he could understand Daniel’s fear a little better from his own story, because Perleth told the broadcaster about the casting phase: “I had only taken testosterone for half a year, so I still looked relatively female. But on all the casting portals, open where I might have been found, I had already changed my name to Jonathan.” According to NDR, the spelling “trans man” is the one he chose.
Director Loose explains the casting process: “Of course we also wanted to find someone for this role who is a trans person himself. We carried out a very complex, initially open-ended casting with trans people, non-binary actors, cis straight actors, etc. It was very intense work.”
“Police call 110: Daniel A.” is a real drama and an exciting crime thriller, in which humor is not neglected in the right places. Speaking of which, what makes the film so worth seeing is the readjustment of the Rostock investigative team. At the latest after this episode, the viewers should have taken the new inspector Melly Böwe to their hearts. This is due to the role, but also to Lina Beckmann’s acting skills. There is no sign of a cool detective here, but the Sunday crime thriller audience is presented with a character they can identify with. So wonderfully normal, a bit clumsy and unintentionally funny and yet successful in solving the case together.
Who would have thought that inspector Alexander “Sascha” Bukow (Charly Hübner, 50) is still sorely missed in the police station, but he is replaceable.
And a little tip at the end: The “Police call 110: Daniel A.” is also available as an audio podcast in the ARD Audiothek to accompany the thriller. As the broadcaster further reports, the original voices of all actors can be heard in the audio version, for example when on the go. There is also a narrator who leads through the plot of the story.
The 90-minute audio film version of the TV crime thriller will be available for streaming and download from February 19, 2023.
