You notice it quickly. Better not to mess with this woman. Undertaker Blum (Anna Marie Mühe) is petite and level-headed, but she’s also anything but squeamish. If the bereaved don’t have the money for an overly long coffin, she sometimes saws off the last 15 centimeters, including the feet, from the corpse. The dead man thinks the solution is great – he appears to Blum in one of the many visions in her workroom. The odd woman chats with the dead as with good old friends. And they chat back.
Presumably nothing could have clouded the idyll of her family of four in a Tyrolean mountain village if the heroine of the mini-series “Totenfrau” hadn’t had one of her most important people taken from her in a split second. Her husband, the village policeman Mark, is just about to set off on his motorcycle when a black SUV rams into him at high speed, runs over him and kills him.
Driver and car race away, disappear without a trace. Blum soon realizes that several local celebrities have conspired. At some point, the undertaker no longer wants to accept the investigators’ inaction and becomes a bloody avenging angel. At the same time, she soon comes across the trail of a number of young girls who have disappeared.
Fighting a wall of silence is the focus of the Netflix six-part series. It is the film adaptation of a bestseller by award-winning Austrian author Bernhard Aichner. The scripts contributed, among others, the “Outlander” author Barbara Stepansky. The result is extremely brutal in places and is only softened in a few places by very Austrian black humor. So the basic idea of a serial killer with a hearse is absolutely charming.
But then it’s above all the brilliant actors who keep this Netflix series from drifting into more or less exciting carnage. In addition to Anna Maria Mühe (“Our Wonderful Years”), Felix Klare (“Tatort”), Yousef Sweid (“Unorthodox”), Romina Küper (“Baby Bitchka”), Simon Schwarz (“Eberhofer Crime”) and Shenja appear Laughs (“Erzgebirge thriller”).
In her own words, the 37-year-old leading actress does not allow her ten-year-old daughter to see “Totenfrau”. She told the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung” in an interview: “Absolutely not, even if you couldn’t see what I was doing explicitly or what was being done to the kidnapped girls.” She herself has not had a good experience in this regard, reported the daughter of Jenny Gröllmann and Ulrich Mühe: “I still remember what it was like to see my parents’ films as a child, and from today’s perspective I would say that I am a saw a few movies too soon.”
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