The Frankfurt inspectors Anna Janneke (Margarita Broich) and Paul Brix (Wolfram Koch) find not one, but six bodies when they are called to the villa of the psychiatrist Adrian Goser (Martin Wuttke). “It seems to have been a wild party,” Brix suspects, while his colleague Janneke thinks it’s more like “a massacre.” In fact, Goser uses the controversial method of psycholysis, in which he treats his “companions”, as he calls his patients, with psychedelic drugs. At one meeting something went terribly wrong: Six people are dead, Goser is the only survivor. During a crime scene inspection in his house, the psychoanalyst is supposed to reconstruct the events of the evening. But the mission goes completely out of control and there are more deaths.
The film is primarily supported by the eccentric psychiatrist Adrian Goser. Theater star Martin Wuttke plays him as a kind of cynical guru whose emotions constantly fluctuate: sometimes he’s gentle and understanding, sometimes loud and short-tempered. The screenwriters Nikias Chryssos and Michael Comtess have created a multi-faceted character that Wuttke ingeniously fills with life. The 60-year-old is no stranger to the “crime scene” world: from 2008 to 2015, Wuttke investigated alongside Simone Thomalla in Leipzig. In addition, he and the “Frankfurt” commissioner Margarita Broich were a couple for many years and have two sons together.
The film jumps back and forth on different time levels. This doesn’t create a real narrative flow. What happened in the past and on the night of death in Goser’s villa comes out only in bits and pieces. Towards the end, the thriller loses more and more of its structure. The viewer feels as if they themselves are part of one of Goser’s psychedelic sessions. And above all there is the bizarre question of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s favorite film.
When Janneke and Brix find out that they are dealing with a psychoanalyst in their investigation, their reactions are very different. While Brix condemns psycholysis as “nonsense” and can’t take it all seriously, his colleague is quite interested and admits that she has already read some of the suspect Adrian Goser’s books. This causes controversial discussions among the commissioners, but in the end there is a surprising reconciliation over beer.
“Leben Tod Ekstasy” is the title of the “crime scene” from Frankfurt. In addition, there are crazy drug trips and morbid delusions: If all this is not too much for you on a Sunday evening, you are welcome to tune in.
The Frankfurt commissioners Anna Janneke and Paul Brix also investigated these cases:
