The physician Dr. Björn Kehrer (Markus Knüfke) is called to an emergency at Bremen harbor at midnight. When he gets there, he finds no one. Instead, a car suddenly speeds towards him and hits him. Kehrer ran a family doctor’s practice and treated refugees and homeless people on a voluntary basis. His medical assistant Kirsten Beck (Lisa Jopt) describes him as a do-gooder and a Samaritan. “He took care of everyone: religion, skin color – it didn’t matter whether they were insured or not.” Nevertheless, she seems to be hiding something and is thus targeted by investigators Liv Moormann (Jasna Fritzi Bauer) and Linda Selb (Luise Wolfram). Also suspected is the activist Ann Gelsen (Anna Bachmann). Her brother is spastic and Dr. Kehrer refused him treatment – now the boy is in a coma and fighting for his life. And there is the crew of a freighter that was anchored in the harbor at the time of the murder. What did the men see or do they even have anything to do with the case?
How do you want to live your life? What do social constraints and family expectations do to a person? Is there a way out of misery and poverty? These questions form the central theme of the film. Screenwriter Christian Jeltsch and director Oliver Hirschbiegel discuss it like an episodic film based on various fates. There is the doctor’s assistant as a single mother of three children, the activist who falls in love with a daughter from a rich family and works together with her to distribute food to those in need, or the tobacco entrepreneur who continues to puff his cigars despite having lung cancer. All of these people are united by their relationship to the killed doctor. How these connections are unraveled step by step and in the end everything leads to the murderer is exciting and entertainingly staged.
In addition to the actual solving of the murder, there is a parallel plot that partly takes place in Copenhagen and relates to the past of investigator Mads Andersen (Dar Salim). He worked as an undercover agent before joining the police force in Bremen. Even if it’s nice to see the “crime scene” in a cosmopolitan way, the jumping back and forth sometimes disrupts the narrative structure.
“Back or just visiting?” These are the words with which BKA investigator Linda Selb greets her colleague Mads Andersen. He was supposed to be recruited for a job in the Interior Ministry in Copenhagen, but decided against it. In Bremen he investigates on his own, while his colleagues Selb and Moormann usually travel in pairs. One scores with morbid humor, the other with specialist knowledge. A duo with potential. In the long run it must be clear whether Mads Andersen is part of the investigative team or not. He was not there in the third Bremer case, which aired in 2022.
Second case worth seeing from the new “Tatort” team from Bremen. If you don’t know him yet, you should tune in.
The “Tatort” episode “And the night always wins” was first broadcast on December 12, 2021. ARD will repeat the case on Friday, September 8, 2023, at 10:20 p.m.
